Departure
98%
vs 95% ▲ 3
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
RAF Ascension Island, known to aviators as Wideawake Airfield, is a joint Royal Air Force and United States Space Force base on the remote South Atlantic outpost of Ascension Island. It offers one very long paved runway and a storied history as a wartime and Falklands-era staging post, but access is tightly restricted to state aircraft and the monthly civil link with Saint Helena.
RAF Ascension Island, also known as Wideawake Airfield or Ascension Island Auxiliary Field, is a military airfield at Cat Hill on Ascension Island, one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world, roughly midway across the South Atlantic between Africa and South America. It is jointly operated by the Royal Air Force and the United States Space Force, and under a UK-US agreement only state aircraft such as military and diplomatic flights may use it, with the sole exception of civil aviation between Ascension and Saint Helena. For the simulator pilot it is a fascinating destination: a single vast runway on a volcanic island, steeped in Second World War and Falklands War history, with no other airfield for many hundreds of miles in any direction.
The airfield sits at Cat Hill on Ascension Island, a British Overseas Territory within Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean roughly 1,540 km from the African coast and 2,300 km from South America. The nearest other significant aerodrome is St Helena Airport, some 1,300 km to the southeast, to which Ascension maintains its only regular civil air link. Oceanic HF air traffic control for the surrounding airspace is provided on behalf of the Atlantico FIR. Because of its isolation, Ascension effectively stands alone in its own airspace bubble with no adjacent controlled zones or other fields to consider when planning an approach.
The airfield has a single physical runway, 13/31, some 10,011 feet long with a hard surface and runway lighting. There is no ILS. At 10,000 feet plus in length, it is one of the longest runways anywhere, originally built to handle wartime bomber traffic and later extended to support Cold War tracking-station logistics and the long-range Falklands air bridge.
Radio services are provided on several frequencies: an air-to-ground service, RAF Havens, on 1124.7 MHz; an HF area control frequency, Atlantico FIR, on 1795.5 MHz; a radio facility, Ascension Radio, on 1078 MHz; and a tower frequency, Wideawake Tower, on 126.2 MHz. There is no published instrument approach making use of an ILS at the field.
Ascension's aviation story began in 1939 when the island became important as a high-frequency direction-finding radio station covering Atlantic trade routes. Wideawake Airfield itself, named after the noisy colony of sooty terns nearby, was constructed in 1942 by a United States task force, including the USAAF 38th Engineer Combat Regiment, working with the British government, and opened on 10 July 1942. The first aircraft to land was a Fairey Swordfish from HMS Archer in June 1942, and the field went on to be used by more than 25,000 aircraft as a Second World War staging post. An unusual wartime visitor was a captured German Junkers Ju 88 bomber, which landed there in October 1943 while being ferried in stages from the Middle East to the United States. A US Air Force tracking station, later administered by the US Space Force, was activated as a satellite of Patrick Air Force Base in Florida on 25 June 1956, and the runway was extended in the latter part of 1980. The RAF re-garrisoned the base in 1982 and used it extensively as a staging airfield for Avro Vulcan bombers and Handley Page Victor tankers during the Falklands War, most famously for the long-range Operation Black Buck bombing raids, the first of which flew on 30 April 1982; at one stage during the conflict Wideawake became the busiest airport in the world by aircraft movements. In more recent years the runway has needed significant remedial work: a 2017 parliamentary answer disclosed the need for full-depth resurfacing, and in June 2020 the US Department of Defense announced repairs that suspended commercial flights until normal operations resumed in August and September 2022 once the eastern side of the runway was completed.
Ascension remains a Permanent Joint Operating Base run day to day by around 19 RAF personnel headed by a wing commander, under the overall jurisdiction of the Commander British Forces South Atlantic Islands, with a similar complement of United States personnel supporting the station. It functions as the refuelling point for the Ministry of Defence's South Atlantic air bridge flights between RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and RAF Mount Pleasant in the Falkland Islands, and hosts a US Space Force ground tracking station supporting the Eastern Range and Cape Canaveral rocket launches. Since November 2017 the Ascension Island Government has contracted the South African carrier Airlink to operate a monthly scheduled charter service to and from St Helena Airport, arriving on Saturday afternoons and returning on Sunday mornings; this remains the principal civil access to the island. Because access is restricted to state aircraft, with civil aviation permitted only on the Ascension-St Helena link, any flight to the airfield requires prior permission.
