The First World War station was officially RNAS Anglesey, though it picked up nicknames from each of the local villages - RNAS Bodffordd, RNAS Gwalchmai, RNAS Llangefni. The Royal Naval Air Service flew non-rigid SS-class airships from here on coastal patrol, looking for U-boats in the western approaches. The experimental work was inventive. Operators tried suspending hydrophones beneath airships to listen for submarines underwater - the sort of idea you would only think of if you had unlimited time aloft and a quiet platform. They tested phosphorus smoke screens at sea. Most strikingly, engineers experimented with bleeding hydrogen from the airship envelope to fuel the engine, recycling the lifting gas as combustion fuel. The airships talked by radio to a relay station at Llaneilian on the north coast, which then phoned the airship base. Wartime aviation in 1918 was held together by ingenuity and string.

The base reopened for the Second World War in a different role. It was originally intended for No. 6 Air Gunnery School, but that unit never materialised. In December 1942, No. 3 Air Gunnery School transferred down from RAF Castle Kennedy in southwest Scotland, bringing 48 Blackburn Botha torpedo bombers (an aircraft so disliked it was withdrawn from front-line service), 6 Fairey Battle light bombers, and 8 Miles Martinet target tugs. The Bothas were soon replaced by the more reliable Avro Anson. By October 1943, 3 AGS had returned to Scotland. Mona then ran through a long series of training schools, gliding schools, and observers' courses through the rest of the war and the postwar years.

From August 1960 Mona became a satellite of No. 4 Flying Training School at RAF Valley, and that is essentially what it remains: a relief landing ground, used to take pressure off Valley's runways and to give student pilots a different field to practise on. Hawks and Tucanos and, more recently, the Beechcraft Texan T.1 and Embraer Phenom, have all worked the Mona circuit. The Mona Flying Club operates from the field most weekends and some evenings, sharing the runway with military training movements. There have been incidents - a Hawk crashed in 2007 with the pilot safely ejecting, another overshot in 2013 after striking a goose during a forced-landing practice, and in 2016 a man was convicted of endangering aircraft by shining a powerful torch at pilots during night fast-jet training. Mostly, though, it is what airfields like this should be: working, quiet, present in the background of a busier neighbour.

Almost nothing visible at Mona today speaks of 1918. The airship sheds were long ago dismantled. What survives is the location - the same low Anglesey ground that Elmhirst lifted off from when he set out to thread his airship under the Menai Bridge. The bridge is still there too, just to the east, the wrought-iron span Thomas Telford finished in 1826. If you fly the Mona circuit you will likely see it in the distance, and if you know the story you can imagine, for a moment, a fabric-skinned airship drifting across the strait toward a celebration nobody had dared hope to live to see.