No. 18 Group RAF
military unit

No. 18 Group (18 Gp) of the Royal Air Force was a group active from 1918 to 1919, and from 1938 to 1996.
History
The Group was initially formed on 1 April 1918 in No. 4 Area RAF. It was transferred to North-Eastern Area RAF on 8 May 1918. Disbanded 18 October 1919.
1938–1945
The group was reformed on 1 September 1938 as No. 18 (Reconnaissance) Group of Coastal Command for operations with the Royal Navy's Commander-in-Chief, Rosyth and the Orkney & Shetlands Naval Command. Its headquarters were established at Rosyth.
Of the three groups forming Coastal Command's planned dispositions on the outbreak of war, 18 Group was the only one with a fully operational Navy/Air Force Area Combined Headquarters (ACHQ). It covered much of the North Sea and areas to the north and west of Scotland, north of a line running north west from the Mull of Kintyre.
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This entry incorporates text from “No. 18 Group RAF” 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.