Online Talk and live Q&A available on the museum website from 7pm, Wednesday, 27 September 2023
Details RAF Brize Norton’s role in the evacuation two years ago
Speaker Emily Flynn was the Station Commander at Brize from 2020-2022
Free to view on the museum’s website, with donations encouraged in support of Soldiers of Oxfordshire Trust.
An online talk, streaming live and on demand exclusively on the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum’s website, will be available from 7pm, 27 September 2023. The talk will explore the role RAF Brize Norton played in the 2021 evacuation of Kabul.
Speaker Air Commodore Emily Flynn was the Station Commander at RAF Brize Norton during Operation Pitting, the British military operation to evacuate British and Afghan nationals from Afghanistan’s capital.
RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire is the country’s largest RAF Station and the RAF’s Air Mobility Hub, whose aircraft and personnel were pivotal in the evacuation of around 15,000 people hoping to make a new life in the UK following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The evacuation was the largest airlift since Berlin in 1948. Running at the same time as other nation’s evacuation efforts, overall 122,000 people were flown out of Afghanistan by the end of August 2021.
Emily Flynn will discuss her role in command at the station, and its role in the historic evacuation effort. Working around the clock for just over two weeks, the RAF flew 260,000 miles, making some 330 flights, and at one point were airlifting 1,000 people a day to safety.
Free to view, the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Trust will encourage donations during the stream. Funds raised will continue to support the Trust’s work preserving the county’s military heritage through care of its archival collections and telling more diverse personal stories of courage, conflict and peace in the Woodstock-based museum.
Following the live stream and Q&A, the recorded talk will remain available to view on-demand.
