Freak Storm Damage Royal Naval Airbase At RAF Hal Far 1936

Hal Far airfield, one of the most popular foreign posts for British Royal Navy air crews throughout the decades, was the first permanent airfield to be constructed in Malta, and its location on the Island gave it a position of great strategic importance in the Mediterranean, providing a base for all units disembarked from carriers on the important route to the rest of the Empire. Because of better approaches over the sea than Malta's other airfields, Hal Far became the preferred diversionary base, while excellent range facilities rendered it the ideal place from where intensive armament training could be undertaken by squadrons on their arrival. At times, especially in the late 1920s/mid-1930s, and again in the 1950s as HMS Falcon, Hal Far was one of the busiest airfields in the entire Fleet Air Arm; indeed, for a time between 1958 and 1962 Hal Far was of particular importance to the FAA as its only remaining overseas land station after the closure of Sembawang in Singapore. But to understand the growth of the base's importance one has to start the story from the beginning and go back in time to the period at the outbreak of the First World War, at the dawn of practical naval aviation.
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