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List of Royal Air Force Communication units

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ96388461 ↗
Source-derived summary

This is a List of Royal Air Force Communication units. "Communication" in the Royal Air Force sense meant units of light transport/liaison aircraft, very frequently supporting a command headquarters.

To allow rapid transport of air officers, staff and other important people many units and Headquarters operated communication Sections, Flights, Squadrons or wings.

A single wing of this type, the 2nd Tactical Air Force Communication Wing RAF, was established on 31 March 1945, and disbanded only three and a half months later at RAF Buckeburg on 15 July 1945, by being reduced to the British Air Forces of Occupation Communication Squadron.

Squadrons

Units

Flights

References

Citations

Bibliography

Lake, A (1999). Flying units of the RAF. Shrewsbury, UK: Airlife. ISBN 1-84037-086-6.

Sturtivant, Ray; Hamlin, John (2007). Royal Air Force flying training and support units since 1912. Tonbridge, UK: Air-Britain (Historians).

Editorial summary

“List of Royal Air Force Communication units” enters the record as wikimedia list article. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what List, Royal and Force can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1945, 1999, 2007, 1912—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around List, Royal and Force.
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“List of Royal Air Force Communication units” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, List, Royal and Force provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96388461. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1999, 2007 and 1912.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “List of Royal Air Force Communication units” 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.