Full WW2 control tower details and photos for this wartime airfield are coming soon. Please check back later as this is work progress. If you would like to contribute information or photos please get in touch.
RAF Fulbeck, in Lincolnshire south-west of Sleaford, is best understood as a specialist station within the RAF’s training and support system rather than a long-term front-line bomber base. Built during the expansion years and opened in 1942, it had the runways and infrastructure needed for intensive flying, but its wartime identity was shaped by the practical requirements of instruction, adaptation and the steady production of competent crews.
Stations like Fulbeck were often used as satellites for major training units, taking overflow circuits and navigation sorties, and providing space for exercises that could not be run safely on congested parent stations. Training pipelines were complex. A pilot might move from elementary instruction, to service flying school, to an operational training unit, and then to a conversion unit for heavy aircraft. At each stage, more procedures and responsibilities were added. Fulbeck’s purpose sat within that layered system: turn trainees into dependable aircrew by repetition and disciplined standards.
Lincolnshire’s bomber county geography also mattered. Fulbeck sat inside a region full of heavy bomber stations, which meant aircraft movements overhead were constant and the training environment was embedded in the reality of operational traffic. That proximity could create opportunities: training crews could learn route discipline and airfield procedures in a region where those procedures were part of everyday life. It could also create hazards: crowded skies and high sortie rates increased accident risk, and the pressure to maintain output meant instructors and ground crews worked hard to keep standards high.
During wartime, Fulbeck also took on support roles that extended beyond training alone. Airfields might be used for temporary accommodation of visiting units, for the processing of personnel, or for specialist handling of aircraft types used in training and co-operation work. In the war’s later stages, and especially after 1945, many stations acquired an additional ‘afterlife’ role as holding sites for equipment and vehicles as units stood down. These transitions were part of demobilisation on a huge scale, where the RAF’s wartime infrastructure was repurposed to manage the wind-down as efficiently as it had managed expansion.
For local communities, a station like Fulbeck meant a wartime population surge: vehicles on rural roads, billets in nearby villages, and the sound of repeated training circuits. The social experience of a training station could be intense because it mixed personnel at early stages of service with instructors, ground crew, and administrative staff, creating a small, temporary wartime town.
After the war Fulbeck closed and the land returned largely to agriculture, but the airfield’s historical value remains. It represents the ‘workshop layer’ of the RAF system – where training and support were delivered at scale – helping sustain Bomber Command and the wider air campaign through competence, procedure and endurance.
Fulbeck also helps explain how the RAF managed aircrew wastage and replacement. Training and support stations absorbed the constant flow of personnel – new arrivals, instructors rotated from operational tours, and crews preparing for conversion. That movement created a living pipeline, and Fulbeck’s role was to keep that pipeline smooth so operational stations could be reinforced without delay.