Blogs

By Ewan Burnet (July 2026)

The RAF Museum was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1972. Like the Museum’s other collections, the film and sound archive was set up alongside the establishment of the museum and has continued to grow since. The collection now includes approximately 12,000-15,000 reels of celluloid film, videos and sound recordings in analogue and digital formats.  Although the bulk of the collection consists of 16mm and 35mm film reels (and some 8mm and 9.5mm amateur footage as well) it also includes 383 35mm filmstrips.  Alongside these, the museum’s document archive holds two filmstrip catalogues, and the museum’s collection also includes a filmstrip projector. Moving-image training films, mostly on 16mm celluloid, and more recently moving to video and digital formats, are well-known, and well-represented in the museum’s archive, and many have been digitised and used for research and exhibitions.  Filmstrips, however, are a forgotten feature of RAF training in the pre-digital era. It is good, therefore, to have the opportunity to rediscover this once-widely used and now often overlooked and unknown format.

The subjects covered by the RAF Museum’s collection shed light on RAF training during the mid-to-late twentieth century and also on some of the RAF’s connections with other organisations and other nations. These include the more obvious subjects for service training, such as RAF operations around the world during the 1950s and 1960s, geography, map-reading, meteorology, aircraft recognition and technical areas such as jet engines, radio, radar, aircraft instruments and ejection seats.  The history of the RAF is also covered, including several aspects of the Second World War – the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, Bomber Command – and the post-war world, such as the Berlin Airlift and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).  Many – but not all – of the museum’s filmstrips are also accompanied by a booklet containing guidance notes for instructors.

The RAF also used filmstrips produced by other organisations and these can be found in the collections. Filmstrips produced for the Royal Navy, the British Army and the United States Navy, particularly relate to technical subjects such as electricity, radio maintenance and the basic theory of engines.  There are also filmstrips produced by other British government departments such as the Home Office and Ministry of Information, covering subjects relating to the wider world beyond the RAF. The broad range of topics discussed in this category includes, to give some examples, the British royal family, railways, ocean liners, global airline operations, memory, and personal hygiene.

These subjects perhaps reflect the RAF’s long-standing intention that its people should have knowledge of the world beyond what was strictly relevant to their RAF roles.  For example, visits to other countries, to other branches of the armed forces, and to civilian areas of work such as factories, were and continue to be a feature of mid-career training courses such as those run at the armed forces’ Staff College and the Royal College of Defence Studies.  Cooperation with and understanding of the British Army and Royal Navy have been increasingly important through the twentieth century and to the present day, and connections maintained with the other services, such as exchange postings and joint training exercises, are likely to have resulted in filmstrips produced for the Army and Navy being put to use in RAF training; it is quite likely that RAF filmstrips could also be found in the Army’s and the Navy’s training resources.

Since the Second World War, the British armed forces have also maintained close links with the armed forces of the United States of America. Senior officers of the two nations regularly meet for discussions, and the more junior ranks have the opportunity to exchange postings. These are a well-established feature of service life on both sides of the Atlantic. The presence of American filmstrips in this collection may be just one easily overlooked reflection of this long-running exchange programme.

It is not entirely clear when the RAF stopped using filmstrips, although this will hopefully be established with further research.  However, as in all other areas of life, it has its clear present-day successor in the ubiquitous PowerPoint, as widely used by the armed forces as it is everywhere else.  From a user perspective, PowerPoints have the added advantage that anyone can produce a presentation, while filmstrips required slightly more specialised skills and facilities (however, filmstrips were still easier to produce than films).  This in turn may have made the sharing of existing filmstrips a more appealing option than the production of new ones.  Furthermore, filmstrips, as a physical, analogue format, can be found forgotten in cupboards and drawers.  The modern counterpart, in contrast, presents a different set of challenges.  Files on a computer are often deleted, more easily lost, less likely to be seen as something worthy of donation to a museum or archive and more vulnerable to format obsolescence.  Archives, though, are devising and seeking solutions to the question of how to preserve this precarious history.  Hopefully, future generations will be able to make use of both digital and analogue formats in researching the eras that they belong to, as we are able to make use of filmstrips as research material in our present.

Ewan Burnet is the Curator of Film and Sound collection at the RAF Museum.

Images:

Top: A filmstrip frame enlarged on a Steenbeck at the RAF. Courtesy RAF Museum.

Left: A box of the Royal Airforce Filmstrips in their original metal boxes and accompanying booklets found at the RAF.

Bottom 1: Some RAF Filmstrips in their original cardboard boxes. The cylindrical boxes contained both the filmstrip and the lecture notes. Courtesy Royal Air Force (RAF) Museum.

Bottom 2: Some of the non-RAF Filmstrips at the Museum, including those made about British Air Routes by the civilian company Common Ground. Courtesy RAF Museum.

Bottom 3: The filmstrip History of the Royal Air Force Since 1945: Berlin Airlift. Courtesy RAF Museum.

Bottom 4: The accompanying booklet to the filmstrip History of the Royal Air Force Since 1945: Berlin Airlift. Courtesy RAF Museum.

To cite this blog: Ewan Burnet “Filmstrips: An overlooked insight into Royal Air Force history,” Relocating Filmstrips, Remapping Europe Website eds. Tom Rice, Vinzenz Hediger, Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal, Johannes Praetorious-Rhein, 2026.