The Royal Naval School of Flight Deck Operations is the Fleet Air Arm's training establishment for aircraft handling.
It was known as the School of Aircraft Handling until November 1995, when the officer unit in Dorset joined. The whole site was at Gosport until 1957, and moved again in November 1959 to Cornwall. It included Naval Air Command Fire School.
The current site officially opened in October 1995.[1]
The site trains around 1500 sailors per year. Training includes a 15 week course for aircraft handlers (AH) and flight deck officers.
A new Flight Deck Training Simulator was built in November 2015 by Systems Engineering and Assessment (SEA) of Frome, costing £500,000. It has Kinect motion sensing.[2]
Four F-35 models were built in June 2017 by Gateguards Ltd of Cornwall.[3][4]
The site has a 600ft practice flight deck.