HMS Sultan: The Airfield That Taught the World to Fly Before It Taught the Navy to Repair Engines

A Genuine Birthplace of Modern Flight Training

Before it was ever associated with marine engineering, the Military Road site at Gosport had a long and significant aviation history, operating as a Royal Flying Corps and later Royal Air Force airfield from 1914.

To understand why what happened next was so important, it helps to know how bad flying training was in 1916. Pupils were sent up with almost no dual instruction, in aircraft that were often worn out, by instructors who had frequently been posted to the job because they were no longer fit for the front. There was no agreed method. A pupil learned whatever his particular instructor happened to believe, and a great many of them were killed learning it, in numbers the Royal Flying Corps found extremely difficult to defend.

The prevailing doctrine made it worse. Dangerous manoeuvres, above all the spin, were treated as things to be avoided and were therefore not taught, which meant that the first time a pilot entered a spin was usually by accident, alone, and often close to the ground. Men died because nobody had told them what to do.

Its most remarkable chapter came between 1916 and 1917, when Major Robert Smith-Barry established his School of Special Flying there and devised what became known as the Gosport System, a deliberately radical approach that taught pilots to recover from dangerous manoeuvres rather than simply avoid them.

The method was so effective that it was adopted globally, with Lord Trenchard crediting Smith-Barry with having taught the air forces of the world how to fly, a particularly remarkable legacy for what would later become, on the surface at least, a rather more workmanlike engineering school.

He Did Not Train Pilots. He Trained the Instructors.

The single most important thing about the Gosport System is the thing most often left out of it. Smith-Barry's school did not exist to turn out pilots. In August 1917 his unit became the School of Special Flying, and its purpose was to teach flying instructors how to instruct. He had worked out that the problem was not the pupils and not the aeroplanes. It was that nobody had ever thought seriously about how to teach.

What he then built is recognisable to any pilot today. The pupil sat in the front cockpit with a full set of controls and the instructor sat behind him, which is the opposite of the usual arrangement and puts the learner in the position he will eventually occupy alone. The instruction itself was standardised into a sequence of set explanations, known as patter, so that every pupil in the service was taught the same things in the same order.

And he solved the problem that made all of it impossible, which was noise. Two men in open cockpits behind a rotary engine cannot hear each other. Smith-Barry devised a simple speaking tube running from a mouthpiece at the instructor's end to earpieces in the pupil's helmet, so that an instructor could talk a pupil through a manoeuvre while it was happening rather than shouting at him about it after they landed. It is called a Gosport tube. It is still called a Gosport tube, in open-cockpit aircraft, today.

Then he taught the spin. Deliberately, repeatedly, until pupils could put an aeroplane into one and get it out again without thinking, on the reasoning that a pilot who is frightened of his aircraft will be killed by it and a pilot who has been to the edge and back will not. Even after a pupil went solo, half his remaining flying stayed on dual controls.

Every element of that, the sequence, the standardised patter, the dual instruction, the intercom, the deliberate teaching of the dangerous case, is now simply how flying is taught everywhere in the world. It was worked out on a field in Gosport in about eighteen months by a man in his twenties who had himself been badly injured in a crash.

From Flying Boats to Engine Rooms

The airfield passed to the Admiralty in 1945 as a Royal Naval Air Station, initially commissioned under the name HMS Siskin, before flying finally ceased there on 1 June 1956, at which point a Mechanical Repair Establishment relocated from Portsmouth Dockyard and the site was renamed HMS Sultan.

From that point on it developed into the Royal Navy's principal engineering training establishment, expanding over subsequent decades to cover marine engineering, general service and submarine engineering, and later air engineering trades as well, training generations of the technicians who keep the fleet's machinery running.

The name has its own logic, which is worth knowing because Sultan sounds like an odd choice for an engineering school. It followed the job rather than the place. HMS Sultan was a central-battery ironclad launched in 1870, and after her fighting life ended she was partly dismantled in 1906 and became an artificers' training ship under the name Fisgard IV. In 1931 she was converted again, into a mechanical repair ship, and given her own name back. She spent the Second World War as a depot ship for minesweepers at Portsmouth and was sold in 1947.

So when the Mechanical Repair Establishment came out of Portsmouth Dockyard to Gosport in 1956, the name Sultan had already meant naval mechanical engineering for a quarter of a century. It went ashore with the department that had used it, nine years after the ship herself was broken up.

And the job is a serious one. A marine engineering artificer is not a mechanic in the ordinary sense: the Royal Navy trains people who can diagnose and repair gas turbines, diesels, gearboxes, hydraulics, electrical distribution, refrigeration and firefighting systems, at sea, in a seaway, with no possibility of calling anybody out and frequently with no spare part. Warships are among the most densely engineered objects on earth and every one of them goes to sea with a few dozen people expected to keep all of it running.

That is why the courses are long, why the establishment is large, and why the proposal to close it caused as much alarm as it did. HMS Collingwood does the same job for weapon engineering across the water at Fareham, and between the two of them they produce most of the technical branch of the fleet.

Threatened With Closure, Then Saved

HMS Sultan's future looked notably uncertain for a period in the 2010s, after a 2016 Ministry of Defence estate review proposed disposing of the site entirely, with closure initially pencilled in for around 2026.

Sustained local campaigning followed, led in part by the local Member of Parliament, who called the proposed closure a huge mistake for the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy and Gosport alike, and by March 2019 the closure date had already been pushed back to no earlier than 2029.

The site's future was finally secured outright in December 2022, when the Ministry of Defence formally reversed the closure decision, stating plainly that it was retaining HMS Sultan for which it had an enduring requirement, a genuine reprieve for an establishment that had spent the best part of a decade under threat.

The context makes the reprieve more striking. Gosport has lost almost everything else. HMS St Vincent, which trained boy seamen at Forton, closed in 1969. HMS Dolphin, the home of the submarine service, paid off in 1998. The Royal Hospital Haslar, which had been mending sailors since the eighteenth century, closed to the military in 2007 and entirely in 2009. The armament depots have gone. The airfield itself stopped flying in 1956.

Sultan is what is left, and for about six years it looked as though the town would lose that too. A place that has been in continuous military use since Forton Barracks was built in 1807 was pencilled in for disposal, and the argument that eventually won was not sentimental: it was that the Navy has an enduring requirement for the training and nowhere else to put it.

Engineering the Navy of Tomorrow

Following a further reorganisation in November 2024, command of the site's marine engineering training passed from a joint tri-service structure back to purely Royal Navy control, with the training function now known as the Marine Engineering Training Group, sitting alongside the separate Royal Naval Air Engineering and Survival School and a Nuclear Department run in partnership with the Defence Academy.

HMS Sultan today also maintains its own Marine Engineering Museum and Airfield Museum, the latter a direct, deliberate nod back to the site's earlier life training the pilots who, in Smith-Barry's day, first worked out how to teach flying properly in the first place.

The two museums on one site are a neat summary of a strange history. An establishment that exists to teach people to maintain marine engines also keeps a collection about a First World War airfield, because both things happened on the same few hundred acres, and the second is more historically important than the first.

The Navy did eventually get its own flying training, of course, and it went elsewhere. HMS Heron at Yeovilton has been the Fleet Air Arm's principal air station since the war and is still busy. Gosport kept the ground and gave up the aeroplanes, which given what was worked out there is a small irony worth noting.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.