RAF Marham from the Royal Navy's "Queen Elizabeth"-class aircraft carriers. The first aircraft are arrived at Marham on 6 June 2018, when a four F-35Bs of No. 617 (Dambusters) Squadron, supported by three Voyagers and an Atlas, made an eight hour flight across the Atlantic from Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina. The RAF announced on 5 July 2017 that No. 207 Squadron will be the Operational Conversion Unit for the Lightning II. The squadron is expected to stand up at Marham on 1 July 2019. In 2023 the second front-line squadron, No. 809 Naval Air Squadron, will also form
Kilroy was here in the Army as Private Snoops, and in the Navy he was called The Watcher. Chad might have first been drawn by British cartoonist George Edward Chatterton in 1938. Chatterton was nicknamed "Chat", which may then have become "Chad." "Life Magazine" wrote in 1946 that the RAF and Army were competing to claim him as their own invention, but they agreed that he had first appeared around 1944. The character resembles Alice the Goon, a character in Popeye who first appeared in 1933,; and another name for Chad was "The Goon". A spokesman for the Royal Air Force Museum London