News & competitions

Header image: A BBMF Spitfire cockpit is waiting for the lucky winner of this month's ballot prize.

This month one lucky member of the RAF Memorial Flight Official Club will win a ‘money cannot buy it’ opportunity to experience what it is like to sit in the cockpit of a BBMF Spitfire.

How to enter the ballot

All current members of the RAF Memorial Flight Club have been automatically entered into this month’s ballot. If you’re not already a member, please join the Club before 1st March 2018. 

Title image: ‘Lancaster bomber en route to the target’. (Original photo by John Dibbs)

Seventy-five years ago this month, on the night of 14th February 1943 – St Valentine’s Day – RAF Bomber Command dispatched 142 Lancasters from Nos 1, 5 and 8 Groups to bomb the northern Italian city of Milan, a round trip of over 1,500 miles. In the early hours of 15th February, having made the long flight over the Alps, the bombers converged on Milan, concentrating the attack into the shortest possible space of time to overwhelm the defences. 110 tons of high explosive bombs and 166 tons of incendiaries were dropped, damaging several factories and railway yards, and starting many fires that could be seen from 100 miles away by the homebound bomber crews.

Header image: Ron Gould photographed during his visit to the BBMF in March 2017 (here with Spitfire P7350) and inset in wartime.

Regular readers of our email newsletters may recall an item in the April 2017 issue about a visit to the BBMF in March 2017 by a World War Two veteran Spitfire pilot, Ron Gould, to be reunited with a Spitfire he had flown 72 years before.

We are sad to report that Ron passed away on 28th January, aged 94.