Event Details

The Air Power Lecture is hosted jointly by the CWD and RAF Museum.

After some 30 years flying in operations that have generally been permissive in air power terms, the RAF is now faced with the prospect of fighting for control of the air. Ukraine has demonstrated that the alternative is attritional, costly in blood and treasure, and highly destructive. In these 30 years, RAF culture around risk and safety has been gradually shifting, as it was bound to over time with changing experiences, understanding, process, regulation and technology.

The talk will analyse the evolution of the RAF over the last few decades in terms of the attitude towards and appetite for risk. The specific experience of fighting wars of choice from 1991 onwards, the changing approach of the RAF to flight safety, technological advances, and the peace dividend expected by politicians and the public after the Cold War: all conspired to reduce incrementally the RAF’s appetite for risk. Everything from air crash investigation to safety reporting, from aircraft technology to repatriation of war casualties has played its part. These combined factors have resulted in a situation developing, akin to a slowly boiled frog, where the air force’s culture changed slowly over time, but with the cumulative effect constituting far-reaching change towards risk aversion which has only become fully apparent in retrospect.

Dr Sophy Antrobus is Research Fellow at the Freeman Air and Space Institute, King's College London.

Dr Sophy Antrobus researches contemporary air power in the context of the institutional, cultural and organisational barriers to innovation and effectiveness in modern air forces, in particular the Royal Air Force. She joined the Freeman Air and Space Institute from Portsmouth Business School at the University of Portsmouth where she was a Teaching Fellow in Strategic Studies. She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter in 2019. Her thesis researched the early politics of air power and networks in Whitehall in the inter-war years.

Prior to her PhD, Sophy served in the Royal Air Force for twenty years including in Iraq and Afghanistan and a tour with the Royal Navy. She is a Fellow and elected member of the Council of the Royal Aeronautical Society, a Hudson Fellow with the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre and a member of the Royal Air Force Museum Research Advisory Board.