Royal Aircraft Establishment - Current Use of The Farnborough Site

Current Use of The Farnborough Site

The former RAE Farnborough site is (as of 2011) occupied by:

• Farnborough Airport.
• QinetiQ.
• Housing, hotels, offices etc. The IQ Farnborough development includes several refurbished former-RAE buildings.
• The Farnborough Air Sciences Trust (FAST) museum, which has several former RAE aircraft and other exhibits.
• Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

The National Aerospace Library (NAL), located in the former Weapon Aerodynamics building (Q134 Building) has a collection of over 2,500 technical reports produced by the RAE.

The historic Farnborough factory site houses three major wind tunnels, the 24' low speed wind tunnel (Q121 Building), constructed during the early 1930s, the No. 2 11.5' low speed wind tunnel (R136 Building) and the 8' x 6' transonic wind tunnel within R133 Building, which was originally commissioned in the early 1940s as a 10' x 7' high subsonic speed tunnel, but converted during the mid 1950s. A smaller 2' x 1.5' transonic tunnel is housed in R133 Building, while R52 Building contains the remaining 4' x 3' low turbulence wind tunnel. R52 Building had previously housed two early 10' x 7' low speed tunnels in separate bays, which were replaced by the No. 1 11.5' and 4' x 3' tunnels respectively. The former remains in operation at the University of Southampton. R52 building also previously contained a 5' open jet low speed tunnel, originally built as a sub-scale prototype for the larger 24' tunnel, but subsequently modified for use as a noise measurement facility. Both Q121 and R133 are now Grade I listed buildings.

To the west of the Farnborough site is the 5 metre pressurised low speed wind tunnel, which was commissioned in the late 1970s. This facility remains in operation by QinetiQ, primarily for the development and testing of aircraft high lift systems.