Britain and Finland both claim the world's first independent air force
In 1918 two countries created air arms that answered to no army or navy. Britain's Royal Air Force was formed on 1 April by merging two older flying services. Finland's traces its birth to 6 March, when a Swedish count donated an aircraft. Which came first depends on what counts as official.
Military flying began inside armies. France organised the world's first aviation force in 1910, the ancestor of its Armée de l'Air, and in 1911 Italy used aircraft for reconnaissance and bombing in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War, the first war to feature attacks from aeroplanes and airships. By the First World War, several powers fielded sizeable forces of fighters and bombers, flown in machines about as fast as a modern car and so unreliable that early pilots had strikingly short life expectancies.
An independent air force is a separate branch treated as an equal of the army and navy. The RAF began with more than 20,000 aircraft, its own ministry and a chief with the rank of major-general. Finland's count, Eric von Rosen, gave it a Thulin Typ D, though some argue its force did not formally exist during the civil war of that year. Others followed over the decades: South Africa in 1920, Australia in 1921, Italy in 1923, Chile in 1930, Brazil in 1941, the United States in 1947 and Japan's Air Self-Defense Force in 1954.
Canada offers an organisational cautionary tale. In the 1960s it merged its air force with the army and navy into unified Canadian Forces, dividing aircraft among several commands and putting everyone in the same green uniform. The arrangement proved deeply unpopular. Aviation was regrouped under a single Air Command in 1975, and in 2011 the old name, Royal Canadian Air Force, returned.
Pilots are only a fraction of such services. Every air force depends on logistics, maintenance, intelligence, security, weapons loaders and cyber specialists, and some also run air defence missiles, early-warning networks or even intercontinental ballistic missiles. Countries that copied the Soviet model often kept air defence as a separate force. In peacetime the work includes air policing and air-sea rescue, and some services keep ground troops whose main job is guarding their own air bases.
Source: Air force
