RAF Coningsby is a Main Operating Base. Three front-line Typhoon squadrons live here — No. 3 Squadron, No. 11 Squadron, and No. 12 Squadron, the last a joint RAF/Qatar Emiri Air Force unit that emerged from the Qatari purchase of twenty-four Typhoons from the UK in 2018. No. 29 Squadron runs the Operational Conversion Unit, training new Typhoon crews. No. 41 Squadron, the Test and Evaluation Squadron, develops new tactics, avionics, and weapons. Since June 2007, Coningsby has held QRA(I) South — the southern half of the UK's airborne air-defence alert. Armed Typhoons sit in hardened shelters with pilots on call, ready to launch within minutes. Most QRA sorties are routine: civilian airliners that have stopped responding to air traffic control, or Russian Tu-95 Bears and Tu-160 Blackjacks probing the edge of UK airspace north of Scotland (Coningsby's northern counterpart, RAF Lossiemouth, usually handles those). The station hosts nearly 3,000 military personnel, civil servants, and contractors. In September 2025, two Mitsubishi F-15J jets of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force arrived at Coningsby — the JASDF's first fighter deployment to Europe in its 71-year history.

The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight has been at Coningsby since March 1976, when it moved from RAF Coltishall. Its hangar is open to the public most days. Inside sit six Spitfires of various marks, two Hawker Hurricanes, the Lancaster PA474, a Douglas Dakota for transport and crew flying, and two de Havilland Chipmunks used for pilot training. The Flight does flypasts at royal events, anniversaries, and air shows across Britain. To hear Merlin engines warming up on a Lincolnshire morning, eighty years after they were designed, is an experience no recording captures — it is mechanical, alive, and oddly tender. On 25 May 2024, the Flight lost Spitfire MK356 in a crash shortly after takeoff from Coningsby; its pilot, Squadron Leader Mark Long, was killed. He had been with the team for four years and was set to take command of the BBMF the following October. The aircraft had been on its way to display at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre at East Kirkby, twelve miles east. The Flight continues; the loss is acknowledged in everything they do.

The station opened on 4 November 1940 under No. 5 Group of RAF Bomber Command. The first squadron, No. 106 with Handley Page Hampden medium bombers, arrived in February 1941 and bombed Cologne the following month. Lancaster squadrons followed through the war — Nos. 61, 83, and 97 among them — flying the same night missions over Germany that defined Bomber Command's catastrophic losses. After the war, Coningsby went through Mosquitoes, Boeing Washingtons, and English Electric Canberras (the first jet to operate from the base, in 1953). The 1960s brought Phantom FGR2s; the 1980s, Tornado F3s; the late 2000s, the Eurofighter Typhoon. In Coningsby's history, briefly, sits the F-111K — the American General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark that the UK was supposed to buy in 1968 to replace the cancelled TSR2, but cancelled in turn when the costs overshot. Coningsby was the planned home for fifty F-111Ks that never arrived. The Typhoon, which now does the job, is what eventually came instead.

The station badge depicts Tattershall Castle, a fifteenth-century brick keep that stands a kilometre northwest of the airfield — one of the great surviving medieval brick buildings in England. The motto is Loyalty binds me. Inside the No. 3 Squadron hardened-shelter complex sits a preserved Hawker Siddeley Harrier GR.3, XW924. The No. 11 Squadron complex holds an English Electric Lightning F.6, XT753. Another Lightning, XS897, sits in the No. 29 Squadron site. These are aircraft that flew from this airfield within living memory, kept now as gate guardians by the squadrons whose markings they carry. Outside the perimeter, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight's visitor centre lets the public into the hangar. From a perfectly ordinary spot beside the road, you can sometimes watch a Typhoon launch on QRA alert while, in the next hangar, ground crew gently roll a 1945 Lancaster out of its bay.