Royal Air Force and replacement by the F-35, the RAF Lossiemouth-based 15 (Reserve) Squadron (the Tornado Operational Conversion Unit) was disbanded in March 2017. Lightning: On 23 November 2015 it was announced that a total of 138 F-35Bs will be ordered. 617 (The Dambusters) Squadron officially reformed on 18 April 2018 as an RAF Lightning Squadron. The first four aircraft arrived at RAF Marham on 7 June 2018. The Sentry AEW1, based at RAF Waddington, provides airborne early warning to detect incoming enemy aircraft and to co-ordinate the aerial battlefield. The Sentinel R1 (formally known as ASTOR – Airborne STand-Off Radar) provides a
Dave Shannon for the Dambusters memorial at Woodhall Spa near RAF Scampton. His wife Ann died in 1990, and he married artist Eyke Taylor in a civil ceremony at Camberwell, London, on 19 July 1991. On 8 April 1993, shortly before a planned fiftieth anniversary reunion of surviving Dambusters, Shannon died at Denmark Hill, London, following a stroke, and was buried beside Ann at Clifton Hampden, Oxfordshire. The last of the nine pilots who took part in the first wave of the dams raid, he was survived by his second wife and his daughter by Ann. On 17 May 2008, the sixty-fifth