The range opened in 1926 as an air gunnery range attached to and established by Royal Air Force Practice Camp Sutton Bridge. Use of the range began on 27 September 1926, with biplanes firing and dropping bombs over the area formally known as "Holbeach Air Gunnery and Bombing Range", and colloquially simply as Holbeach Marsh Range. During the late 1950s, when RAF Sutton Bridge was placed on a Care and Maintenance role, the coastal marshland air gunnery range was renamed to RAF Holbeach Bombing Range and it became later parented to RAF Marham as an Air Weapons Range within RAF Strike Command. On 1 April 2006 control was transferred to the Ministry of Defence—Defence Training Estate East, located at West Tofts Camp in West Tofts near Thetford in Norfolk; now renamed Defence Infrastructure Organisation East. DIO are responsible for operational support—building, maintaining and servicing the infrastructure, the RAF are responsible for safe practice on the Range. The Range is administered at a local level by the DIO Training Safety Officer, who has an office at the Range. RAF air traffic control personnel staff the Range Control Tower supported by civilian range staff outsourced to Landmarc Solutions.
Emblem
The station's badge features a vertical sword through a crown. The motto is Defend and Strike.
Facilities
Extending over an area of 3,875 hectares, which includes 3,100 hectares of intertidal mudflats and 775 hectares of salt marsh, the air weapons range provides facilities for RAF and NATO-allied aircraft to practice dropping bombs and firing their aircraft weapons, including pre-deployment training. Since 1993 this has included night bombing and helicopter operations. The range facilities are not only used by air force squadrons stationed in the United Kingdom but also fly over directly from airbases located throughout Europe. An assortment of range targets, 8 in total, include several retired merchant ships which have been beached on the sands of The Wash for this purpose. Observation towers parallel to the target line are manned and allow the fall of aircraft ordnance to be calculated for accuracy by means of triangulation. The range includes a helicopter landing pad near the main control tower and since 2010 a new range headquarters building. At the present time aircraft types such as the Tornado GR4, Eurofighter Typhoon, F-35B Lightning II, USAF F-15 Eagle/F-15E Strike Eagle, Hawk Trainer and AgustaWestland Apache AH1 helicopters can be seen operating on the range at various times of the day, including on occasions CV-22B Osprey, HH-60G Pave Hawk, Chinook, Merlin and Puma HC helicopters. The range also hosts frequent Forward Air Control or Joint Terminal Attack Controller exercises.
Strafing
RAF Holbeach also has facilities for scoring strafing runs. The strafing targets are a number of three-metre square net with an orange bullseye made by weaving plastic strips through the chicken-wire net. The Strafe Scoring detects the X-Y position of the projectile from the acoustic signature of the supersonic shock wave. This result is sent by radio to the control tower, where it is displayed to the Air Traffic Controller for relaying to the pilot. The range also has semi-automatic bomb and rocket scoring systems.
