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RAF Fersfield, in Norfolk, was a wartime satellite airfield created to support the RAF’s huge training and support system in East Anglia. In a region dominated by heavy bomber bases, it is easy to overlook smaller sites, but they were essential: they reduced congestion, offered relief landing capacity, and provided flexible runway space for training units and visiting detachments.
Fersfield’s airfield landscape reflected typical wartime design for a secondary station: functional buildings, dispersal points, a perimeter track, and runways suitable for the steady rhythm of training circuits and navigation sorties rather than the mass launch of four-engined bombers. In practice, this kind of station could serve multiple purposes over time – relief for a nearby parent station, additional space for Operational Training Unit flying, or use as an emergency landing ground for aircraft returning damaged or low on fuel.
Training in wartime East Anglia demanded capacity. Aircraft were arriving constantly from factories and depots, crews needed hours and checks, and the sky could become crowded with training and operational traffic. Satellite fields like Fersfield helped manage that pressure. For trainees, a satellite often became the ‘workshop’ where landings were practised until they were repeatable under stress. For instructors and operations staff, it was a way to keep throughput high without turning the parent station into a bottleneck.
Even when not hosting a headline squadron, Fersfield would have lived under the wartime tempo of the region. Convoys carrying fuel, spares and personnel moved constantly between airfields. Blackout conditions shaped night flying. And the surrounding countryside – flat, open and criss-crossed by bomber routes – meant that aircraft movement overhead was a daily reality for local communities. In that environment, the distinction between ‘front-line’ and ‘support’ could blur: a training aircraft might divert in with damage from collision or weather, and operational aircraft could appear unexpectedly, needing somewhere safe to put down.
Many Norfolk and Suffolk stations also contributed to specialised training or co-operation tasks: instrument approaches, radio procedures, and the steady build-up of competence that made operational flying safer. These roles mattered because wartime aircraft were increasingly complex, and the RAF learned repeatedly that reliability came from standardised procedures taught and reinforced across the training network.
After the war, stations like Fersfield typically closed quickly. Temporary buildings were removed, hardstandings returned to fields, and the visible wartime footprint softened into the landscape. Yet the historical significance remains: RAF Fersfield represents the ‘hidden infrastructure’ of the air war – an airfield that supported the training and relief system that allowed bigger, famous stations nearby to keep operating at full pace. Without the satellites, the system would have been slower, more congested and more dangerous.
Fersfield’s significance is also in the way it illustrates how wartime air power was managed geographically. East Anglia’s major bases could not absorb every training circuit, ferry flight and diversion, so smaller fields were built or expanded to take the load. That distribution reduced delays, kept training syllabi on schedule, and increased the number of safe landing options for aircraft with problems – a quiet but life-saving function.