By 1 December 1944, Honeybourne quartered 1,973 men and 382 women - a small wartime town. The five hangars included one J Type and four T2s, the standard prefabricated wartime designs. Accommodation was a mix of permanent brick and temporary Nissen huts. The airfield's defence rested on No. 2828 Squadron of the RAF Regiment. The dominant aircraft on the ground was the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, the lumbering twin-engine night bomber whose distinctive nose-down flying attitude made it look perpetually about to slip into a dive. In April 1944 the unit converted to Vickers Wellingtons - more capable, more demanding - to train Royal Canadian Air Force crews.

Operational Training Units worked at the dangerous edge of aviation. The instructors were tour-finished combat veterans. The pupils were young men with a few hundred hours total in their logbooks, flying tired aircraft that had been hard-used through the early bombing campaign. The weather over the Cotswolds was uncooperative - low cloud, fog rolling off the Severn estuary, icing in winter. Honeybourne's accident records read like a litany of the specific things that went wrong: a Handley Page Hampden stalling on a forced landing in August 1940. A Bristol Blenheim stalling on approach on Christmas Eve 1941. A Lockheed Hudson spinning into the ground in March 1942. A Whitley stalling on overshoot in May 1944. A Wellington crashing on takeoff in January 1945 when an engine failed at the worst possible moment. These were the daylight, written-down incidents. Many more crews simply did not come back from cross-country training flights.

The worst loss at Honeybourne came on the night of 3-4 July 1944. A Wellington of No. 24 OTU returned from a cross-country training flight and crashed on landing into the station's bomb dump. Seven Royal Canadian Air Force airmen died. They were not on operations. They had not yet been posted to a front-line squadron. They were doing the last of the work that turned a crew into a crew - flying the same aircraft across the same dark countryside, navigator and bomb-aimer and pilot all learning each other's rhythms by trial and noise. Their names appear in the casualty lists of the RCAF and in the cemeteries of southern England, in the company of hundreds of others who never reached the operations they had been sent to England to fly.

Just over a year before that night, on 2 June 1943, another Honeybourne Whitley flew into the side of the Cotswold escarpment in low cloud at Broadway Tower. All five crew were killed: Pilot H.G. Hagen, Sergeant E.G. Ekins, Flight Sergeant D.H. Kelly, Sergeant D.A. Marriott and Sergeant R.S. Phillips. Hagen and Kelly were Canadians serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. A small memorial near the tower remembers them by name. The Cotswolds rise sharply south-east of Honeybourne's runways, and aircrews on bad-weather training flights had to know the exact heading and timing that would keep them clear. The men of Z6639 did not.

The OTU disbanded in July 1945. The station closed in July 1948. In 1949 and 1950, parts of the site were repurposed as temporary housing for local families displaced while new council estates were built; people moved out as new houses became ready. The runways stayed in place until 1968, when they were broken up and the concrete sold for hardcore. What was the airside became the Honeybourne Airfield Trading Estate, where some of the original wartime hangars still stand among modern industrial units. Stand in the right corner of one of those hangars on a quiet weekday and the building feels too big for what it now holds. It was built for Whitleys and Wellingtons, and for the young men who flew them into the Worcestershire dark.