Sherburn-in-Elmet Airfield
Sherburn-in-Elmet Airfield is located east of Sherburn in Elmet village and west of Selby, North Yorkshire, England. Pre-War and Wartime history In the 1920s, the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club began operating here. The novelist, pilot, and aeronautical engineer Nevil Shute was a member, and on the club's management committee. At the time, the club was flying de Havilland Moths. In his memoir, Slide Rule, Shute records that ". . . the Yorkshire Club quickly attracted a fair cross-section of young Yorkshire men and women, so that a Sunday spent at the Club was a merry Sunday." He also met his future wife, Frances Mary Heaton, a physician, at the club. After establishing Airspeed Ltd., an aircraft manufacturing firm, he personally flew the first two test flights of the company's first aircraft here. It was a glider, known as the Tern, and was launched using a "very old Buick car" pulling a steel cable. During the Second World War the airfield was used as a Royal Air Force station. From 1940 Blackburn Aircraft used a Ministry of Aircraft Production factory here to build 1699 Fairey Swordfish naval torpedo aircraft. The Airborne Forces Experimental Establishment (AFEE) was moved from RAF Ringway to Sherburn