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RAF Sopley
RAF Sopley was a World War II station, codenamed ''Starlight'', near the village of Sopley in Hampshire. The Radar Station was opened in December 1940. In 1959 it became an air traffic control radar station, and finally closed on 27 September 1974. Nearby Sopley Camp was built in the early 1950s as a domestic site for the radar station and is probably best known as the initial home of the Vietnamese Boat People, in 1979. The camp was sold in 1993 to a local partnership under the name Merryfield Park. Most of the old barracks site had been redeveloped as housing, but the 2-storey building at the Sopley end has been converted into a museum/education centre by Friends Of New Forest Airfields (FONFA). The museum opened in May 2016. History The site started out as an experimental Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) radar station. Using systems developed in nearby Christchurch, a variety of lash-up systems were installed during 1940 and 1941. These were eventually put into produc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sopley
Sopley is a village and civil parish situated in the New Forest National Park of Hampshire, England. It lies on the old main road from Christchurch to Ringwood, on the east bank of the River Avon. The parish extends east as far as Thorny Hill and borders the parishes of Bransgore and Burton to the south and west respectively. It lies down the road from a small hamlet called Ripley. It includes the hamlets of Shirley, Avon and Ripley. The area is mainly rural with less than 300 dwellings. The village is situated on the fringes of the New Forest, just outside the New Forest National Park but within the perambulation boundary of the forest. Most of the buildings date back to the 19th century but there are more modern houses to the north. It is also home to Moorlands College, one of the largest evangelical theological seminaries in the country. The college was built on the site of the old manor house which was demolished in 1988. History There has been settlement in the area sin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hampshire
Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants) is a ceremonial county, ceremonial and non-metropolitan county, non-metropolitan counties of England, county in western South East England on the coast of the English Channel. Home to two major English cities on its south coast, Southampton and Portsmouth, Hampshire is the 9th-most populous county in England. The county town of Hampshire is Winchester, located in the north of the county. The county is bordered by Dorset to the south-west, Wiltshire to the north-west, Berkshire to the north, Surrey to the north-east, and West Sussex to the south east. The county is geographically diverse, with upland rising to and mostly south-flowing rivers. There are areas of downland and marsh, and two national parks: the New Forest National Park, New Forest and part of the South Downs National Park, South Downs, which together cover 45 per cent of Hampshire. Settled about 14,000 years ago, Hampshire's recorded history dates to Roman Britain, when its chi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ministry Of Defence (United Kingdom)
The Ministry of Defence (MOD or MoD) is the department responsible for implementing the defence policy set by His Majesty's Government, and is the headquarters of the British Armed Forces. The MOD states that its principal objectives are to defend the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and its interests and to strengthen international peace and stability. The MOD also manages day-to-day running of the armed forces, contingency planning and defence procurement. The expenditure, administration and policy of the MOD are scrutinised by the Defence Select Committee, except for Defence Intelligence which instead falls under the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. History During the 1920s and 1930s, British civil servants and politicians, looking back at the performance of the state during the First World War, concluded that there was a need for greater co-ordination between the three services that made up the armed forces of the United Kingdom: t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Following the Allied victory over the Central Powers in 1918, the RAF emerged as the largest air force in the world at the time. Since its formation, the RAF has taken a significant role in British military history. In particular, it played a large part in the Second World War where it fought its most famous campaign, the Battle of Britain. The RAF's mission is to support the objectives of the British Ministry of Defence (MOD), which are to "provide the capabilities needed to ensure the security and defence of the United Kingdom and overseas territories, including against terrorism; to support the Government's foreign policy objectives particularly in promoting international peace and security". The R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Air Traffic Control
Air traffic control (ATC) is a service provided by ground-based air traffic controllers who direct aircraft on the ground and through a given section of controlled airspace, and can provide advisory services to aircraft in non-controlled airspace. The primary purpose of ATC worldwide is to prevent collisions, organize and expedite the flow of air traffic, and provide information and other support for pilots. Air traffic controllers monitor the location of aircraft in their assigned airspace by radar and communicate with the pilots by radio. To prevent collisions, ATC enforces traffic separation rules, which ensure each aircraft maintains a minimum amount of empty space around it at all times. In many countries, ATC provides services to all private, military, and commercial aircraft operating within its airspace. Depending on the type of flight and the class of airspace, ATC may issue ''instructions'' that pilots are required to obey, or ''advisories'' (known as ''flight infor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boat People
Vietnamese boat people ( vi, Thuyền nhân Việt Nam), also known simply as boat people, refers to the refugees who fled Vietnam by boat and ship following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This migration and humanitarian crisis was at its highest in 1978 and 1979, but continued into the early 1990s. The term is also often used generically to refer to the Vietnamese people who left their country in a mass exodus between 1975 and 1995 (see Indochina refugee crisis). This article uses the term "boat people" to apply only to those who fled Vietnam by sea. The number of boat people leaving Vietnam and arriving safely in another country totaled almost 800,000 between 1975 and 1995. Many of the refugees failed to survive the passage, facing danger from pirates, over-crowded boats, and storms. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people died at sea. The boat people's first destinations were Hong Kong and the Southeast Asian l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sopley Camp - Former Military Barracks - Geograph
Sopley is a village and civil parish situated in the New Forest National Park of Hampshire, England. It lies on the old main road from Christchurch to Ringwood, on the east bank of the River Avon. The parish extends east as far as Thorny Hill and borders the parishes of Bransgore and Burton to the south and west respectively. It lies down the road from a small hamlet called Ripley. It includes the hamlets of Shirley, Avon and Ripley. The area is mainly rural with less than 300 dwellings. The village is situated on the fringes of the New Forest, just outside the New Forest National Park but within the perambulation boundary of the forest. Most of the buildings date back to the 19th century but there are more modern houses to the north. It is also home to Moorlands College, one of the largest evangelical theological seminaries in the country. The college was built on the site of the old manor house which was demolished in 1988. History There has been settlement in the area sin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ground-controlled Interception
Ground-controlled interception (GCI) is an air defence tactic whereby one or more radar stations or other observational stations are linked to a command communications centre which guides interceptor aircraft to an airborne target. This tactic was pioneered during World War I by the London Air Defence Area organization, which became the Royal Air Force's Dowding system in World War II, the first national-scale system. The ''Luftwaffe'' introduced similar systems during the war, but most other combatants did not suffer the same threat of air attack and did not develop complex systems like these until the Cold War era. Today the term GCI refers to the style of battle direction, but during WWII it also referred to the radars themselves. Specifically, the term was used to describe a new generation of radars that spun on their vertical axis in order to provide a complete 360 degree view of the sky around the station. Previous systems, notably Chain Home (CH), could only be directed along ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AMES Type 7
The AMES Type 7, also known as the Final GCI, was a ground-based radar system introduced during World War II by the Royal Air Force (RAF). The Type 7 was the first truly modern radar used by the Allies, providing a 360 degree view of the airspace around the station out to a distance of about . It allowed fighter interceptions to be plotted directly from the radar display, a concept known as ground controlled intercept, or GCI. Earlier radars, like Chain Home (CH), provided the range and angle to a single target at a time. Arranging an intercept required a complex series of reports from multiple stations that were plotted at a central station. In a seminal 1939 memo, Robert Hanbury Brown showed that this Dowding system resulted in an inherent inaccuracy of approximately , and the only way to reduce this would be to arrange the interception directly from the radar screen. He suggested spinning the radar antenna and the CRT display to produce a 360 degree picture of the airspace arou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Landing Ground
Advanced Landing Grounds (ALGs) were temporary advance airfields constructed by the Allies during World War II during the liberation of Europe. They were built in the UK prior to the invasion and thereafter in northwest Europe from 6 June 1944 to V-E Day, 7 May 1945. Unlike the permanent airfields built in the United Kingdom and designed for the strategic bombardment of Germany, the tactical combat airfields on the continent were temporary, often improvised airfields to be used by the tactical air forces to support the advancing ground armies engaged on the battlefield. Once the front line moved out of range for the aircraft, the groups and squadrons moved up to newly built ALGs closer to the ground forces and left the ones in the rear for other support uses, or simply abandoned them. Overview When the Allies invaded Normandy on D-Day, Royal Air Force Airfield Construction Service engineers were among those in the initial assault waves. Their mission was to rapidly construc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RAF Winkton
Royal Air Force Winkton or more simply RAF Winkton is a former Royal Air Force Advanced Landing Ground previously in Hampshire but now, due to County boundary changes, in Dorset, England. The airfield is located approximately north of Christchurch; about southwest of London, and is named after the nearby hamlet of Winkton. Although complete by September 1943 Winkton opened in March 1944 with Sommerfeld Mesh runways and pierced steel planking perimeter tracks, and was the prototype for the type of temporary Advanced Landing Ground type airfield that would be built in France after D-Day, when the need for advanced landing fields would become urgent as the Allied forces moved east across France and Germany. It was used by British, Dominion and the United States Army Air Forces. It was closed in July 1944, when the mesh runways were lifted for use on the Continent, and immediately returned to agriculture. Today the airfield is a mixture of agricultural fields with no recogniz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by these two superpowers, following their temporary alliance and victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. Aside from the nuclear arsenal development and conventional military deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed via indirect means such as psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The Western Bloc was led by the United States as well as a number of other First W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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