A few members of Scarborough 41 Club recently joined with the Scarborough Round Table to visit the RAF Fylingdales site. We all had to be security checked in advance and went through 2 checks to gain entry to the site on the night.
We were shown into the conference room and given a talk about RAF Fylingdales and amongst other interesting things were informed that:
- The site provides a continuous ballistic missile early warning service to the UK and USA, ensuring a surprise missile attack cannot succeed.
- Any such detection of a missile strike should give 25 minutes notice in which a decision must be made as to whether to counter strike.
- A secondary role is to monitor all objects in space with the size of a fist or larger, all items being numbered and catalogued.
- A third role is as a satellite warning service for the UK keeping track of spy satellites used by other countries.
- We were panning to also visit the operation room but, during the conference room talk, were advised that we were not allowed as there had been a “live incident” which they were monitoring.
- Over 350 service personnel, military police and civilian staff work there.
It was a very interesting tour but I cannot give any more information “as we were sworn to secrecy” at this top secret base.
