No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit RAF
military unit
No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (or 1 PRU) was a flying unit of the Royal Air Force, first formed in 1940.
History
On 24 September 1939, the Royal Air Force formally took over the "Heston Flight", a civilian photo reconnaissance unit headed by Sidney Cotton based at Heston Aerodrome. The unit had previously been contracted by MI6 to perform clandestine photographic reconnaissance over Europe, using civilian-registered Lockheed 12A aircraft. The Flight was redesignated several times, first on 1 November 1939 as No. 2 Camouflage Unit, then on 17 January 1940 as the Photographic Development Unit, then on 18 June 1940 the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, and finally on 14 November 1940, No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit.
The unit was equipped with a variety of aircraft modified for the photographic reconnaissance role, including Supermarine Spitfires, Bristol Blenheims, Lockheed Hudsons and de Havilland Mosquitos.
On 18 October 1942, 1 PRU was disbanded and the individual Flights of the Unit were renamed 540 Squadron, 541 Squadron, 542 Squadron, 543 Squadron and 544 Squadron.
On 1 June 1982, the Unit was revived at RAF Wyton when No.
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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 Nov 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7043106. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1939, 1942 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit 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.