Air Ministry
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117
MENTIONS
43
EPISODES
17
PODCASTS
Search complete. 117 mentions across 43 episodes found for "Air Ministry".
Sep 22, 2026
speaker_17SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
[instrumental music]Hear the weather forecast as issued at twelve o'clock Greenwich Meaning Time by the Uganda Meteorological Office.
speaker_17SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
They been up on the Air Ministry roof and it pissing down with rain.
speaker_17SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
That the end of the weather forecast.
speaker_18UNKNOWN
[instrumental music]
Steve StocktonHOST
Drem had been reborn.
Steve StocktonHOST
The Air Ministry officially reactivated Drem Airfield as a training base.
Steve StocktonHOST
Carpenters and masons moved in, rebuilding the hangars, clearing the weeds, and laying down fresh tarmac, exactly as Goddard had seen from one hundred feet up four years prior.
Steve StocktonHOST
And what about the paint scheme? In late 1938 and 1939, to prevent airborne collisions during rapid training expansions, the RAF issued a fleet-wide order.
Tail DraggerHOST
Wallace calculated that if you could spin a cylindrical drum backward at 500 revolutions per minute, drop it from exactly 60 feet at exactly 220 miles per hour, it would skip across the reservoir surface.
Tail DraggerHOST
Bounce over the torpedo nets protecting the dam, run down the face of the dam wall, and detonate at precisely the right depth to create a shockwave powerful enough to breach the structure, in theory, getting the Air Ministry to believe any of it was another matter entirely.
Tail DraggerHOST
Wallace spent two years fighting for his idea.
Tail DraggerHOST
He tested scaled models and tanks at the National Physical Laboratory, he wrote reports.
5 MINS LATER
Tail DraggerHOST
The strategic impact has been debated by historians ever since.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Germans repaired both dams within months.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Ruhr's industrial output recovered faster than the air ministry had hoped.
Tail DraggerHOST
Some historians argue the tactical results were modest relative to the cost.
Tail DraggerHOST
Every one of those variables had to be exact, change any one of them, and the whole mechanism failed.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Air Ministry was skeptical, some of the senior officers thought Wallace had come unhinged.
Tail DraggerHOST
But his mathematics held up, and in early 1943, after two years of advocacy and months of testing, he got the resources to prove it.
Tail DraggerHOST
The test drops at Chesil Beach on the Dorset Coast confirmed the skip pattern worked.
Tail DraggerHOST
Picture two engineers walking into the British Air Ministry in the autumn of 1938 with a proposal to build the fastest aircraft in the world, out of wood.
Tail DraggerHOST
They got laughed out of the building.
Tail DraggerHOST
I'm Tail Dragger, and this is the hangar on Radio Hangar.
Tail DraggerHOST
A bomber so fast it wouldn't need defensive guns, wouldn't need armor plate, wouldn't need a tail turret or a belly gunner or a top gunner.
Tail DraggerHOST
Just two big Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, a clean twin-engine airframe, and a crew of two, the pilot and a navigator bombardier, side by side up front.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Air Ministry looked at this and said essentially, you have got to be kidding.
Tail DraggerHOST
Their objections had a kind of bureaucratic logic to them.
Tail DraggerHOST
Britain was already desperately short on aluminum and strategic metals.
Tom HannamSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
[laughs] We arrived at Lyneham.
Tom HannamSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
We had a car from there to Air Ministry, where I was debriefed in, you know, the various departments, then the medical.
Tom HannamSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
And there was nothing wrong with me physically, apart from my foot.
Tom HannamSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
I'd spent four, five days walking without one shoe, which I lost.
Tom HannamSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
They'd got lost and just opened the door, walked in, didn't do any harm, just laid down and went to sleep, and thanked my mother, and but that was because she never locked the door, because we never knew what time of the day or hour we've, or whatever, we were gonna arrive back.
Tom HannamSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
My brother's boat would arrive at somewhere, and he'd go home, and it depended on trains, because we had no transport of our own
speaker_1HOST
ownTom's parents had been informed by the Air Ministry that their son was safe in a neutral country
Tom HannamSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
So they did know I was okay.
Frederick GilesVOICE_ACTOR
No, I, I never got there.
LeonardNARRATOR
I have a friend in Ottawa, Winco, in the Air Ministry there, chap named Norman Helfrick.
LeonardNARRATOR
Wonder if you ever met him.
Frederick GilesVOICE_ACTOR
No, I was never there either.
Francis Xavier CostelloVOICE_ACTOR
Yes, sir.
Charles BreretonVOICE_ACTOR
Get me the Air Ministry, please.
Charles BreretonVOICE_ACTOR
Here, you take this.
Charles BreretonVOICE_ACTOR
Ask them where Leading Air Craftsman Frederick Gordon is stationed, will you, whilst I'll, uh, take a look at this thing.
Tail DraggerHOST
The country was rearming as fast as it could, and the factories could not keep pace.
Tail DraggerHOST
Metal was the bottleneck, and Geoffrey de Havilland, whose company had been designing and building aircraft since before the First World War, had an answer that most people in the Air Ministry thought bordered on lunacy.
Tail DraggerHOST
He wanted to build the airplane out of wood.
Tail DraggerHOST
I'm Taildragger.
Tail DraggerHOST
If an airplane is fast enough, it does not need to fight its way home.
Tail DraggerHOST
It runs.
Tail DraggerHOST
He proposed this to the Air Ministry in nineteen thirty-eight.
Tail DraggerHOST
The reception was polite in the way you are polite to a colleague who has clearly lost his grip on reality.
ClaraHOST
No, between the state and the private sector.
ClaraHOST
The government-owned Air Ministry would build one airship, the R-101, using civil servants and state resources.
ClaraHOST
Private Enterprise, which was Vickers and Schutte's team, would build the other, the R-100.
ClaraHOST
Wow.
8 MINS LATER
ClaraHOST
They built a twin engine plane called the Envoy, which was so luxurious and efficient that the Royal Flight actually bought one for the personal use of King George VI.
AdrianHOST
From a bus garage to the king's personal sleet.
ClaraHOST
And as the shadow of World War II began creeping over Europe in the late 30s, the Air Ministry asked Airspeed to develop a military trainer version of the Envoy.
ClaraHOST
This became the Airspeed Oxford.
33 more episodes mention Air Ministry.
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