Charles Edmonds
air officer of the Royal Air Force and naval aviator (1891-1954)
Air Vice Marshal Charles Humphrey Kingsman Edmonds, (20 April 1891 – 26 September 1954) was an air officer of the Royal Air Force (RAF).
He first served in the Royal Navy and was a naval aviator during the First World War, taking part in the Cuxhaven Raid in December 1914; and while serving in the Gallipoli Campaign (1915) he was the first man to sink an enemy ship from an aircraft, using a torpedo.
In the interbellum he remained in the RAF, becoming a senior staff officer during the Second World War.
Early life
In 1903, at the age of 14, Edmonds joined the Royal Navy as cadet. On 15 July 1911 he was promoted from midshipman to sub-lieutenant, serving aboard the battleship HMS King Edward VII from 10 October 1911, taking part in blockade operations during the First Balkan War.
Edmonds then learned to fly at the Bristol School at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain, being granted Royal Aero Club Aviators' Certificate No. 206 on 16 April 1912 after soloing a Bristol Biplane. On 17 February 1913 he was promoted to lieutenant. On 17 May 1913 he was posted to the Central Flying School for a course of instruction, then on 13 August was posted to Calshot Naval Air Station. He served in the Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps until 1 July 1914, when it became the Royal Naval Air Service.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Charles Edmonds” is air officer of the Royal Air Force and naval aviator (1891-1954). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Charles, Edmonds and officer, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5077242. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1891, 1954, 1914 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Edmonds” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.