Qualla: RAF East Kirkby

RAF East Kirkby: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She does not fly. But on a still summer morning at East Kirkby, when the ground crew kick her over and four Rolls-Royce Merlins catch one by one, the Avro Lancaster called Just Jane rolls out of her hangar and taxis down what is left of the old runway. The sound is the point. It is the sound seventy aircrew at this airfield heard on the last night of their lives, and the sound their fathers and sisters waited for in the dark hours before dawn, listening for the bombers to come home.

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RAF East Kirkby: A Bomber Station in the Flatlands

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lincolnshire was made for airfields. Flat, open, drained by Roman engineers and Dutch fenmen, the county became one vast aircraft carrier in the Second World War, ringed with the runways of Bomber Command. RAF East Kirkby opened on 20 August 1943 as one of those stations, tucked ...

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RAF East Kirkby: The Worst Morning

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 17 April 1945, with the war in Europe weeks from ending, ground crews were bombing up a No. 57 Squadron Lancaster on the dispersal. Something slipped. A fully armed 1,000-pound bomb fell from its shackle onto the tarmac. The fuse had already been inserted. The bomb detonated, ...

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RAF East Kirkby: Just Jane

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After 1945 East Kirkby went the way of most Bomber Command stations - sold off by the government in 1964, the runways used for broiler sheds and farm hard standing. Then in the 1980s two brothers, Fred and Harold Panton, bought the site and the control tower in memory of their br...

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RAF East Kirkby: What Remains

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most of the runway is still there. Local farmers use it for hard standing. Model aircraft enthusiasts launch from it on Sunday afternoons. It still appears on civil aviation charts as a diversion emergency landing site, and in 2008 the museum opened a small grass-and-concrete str...

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