Air Cadet Charity

This #TrusteesWeek, we want to say a heartfelt thank you to our incredible trustees, past and present. Your time, expertise, and passion have been invaluable in shaping the Air Cadet Charity. We're truly grateful for your unwavering support. Thank you for your time, dedication, and outstanding efforts! Mark O., Victoria Gridley, Mike Neville, Oliver Jones-Davies, Norman Murray, Graham Bowerman, Sir David Tweedie, Stuart Ensor Royal Air Force Air Cadets

We are delighted to announce that the Air Cadet Charity has received a very generous donation of 230 Prepar3D® Academic Licences from Lockheed Martin. The Academic licences valued at over £10,000 will enable the charity to increase its support towards immersive training as well as enhance education and development of the RAF Air Cadets.     The software licences were presented at the annual RAF Air Cadets’ National Air & Space Camp Industry Day at RAF Syerston by Harvey Plant. Harvey is an engineering graduate and training solutions engineer from Lockheed Martin UK, who himself is a former Air Cadet and qualified private pilot. Here is what Harvey had to say:  “I am delighted to represent Lockheed Martin today to formally hand over the Prepar3D® simulation software to the Air Cadet Charity to allow them to continue supporting the RAF Air Cadets. I know how important this donation will be to the Charity and the Cadets themselves, due to my own experiences as an Air Cadet, where I was encouraged to immerse myself in as many activities as possible.  I passed the Qualified Aerospace Instructors Course (QIAC) in 2014, eventually reaching the rank of Sergeant before leaving to attain my Masters in Aerospace Engineering.”    Collaborating with industry in this way allows us as a charity to increase the support that we can offer. It helps us to achieve our aim of ensuring that young people have equal access to opportunities, activities and support and ensures their time with the RAF Air Cadets allows them to develop their full potential.    Wg Cdr Martin Hughes, Head of Immersive Technologies at the Royal Air Force Air Cadets said: “We are grateful to Lockheed Martin for making a generous donation to the Air Cadet Charity to enable them to continue supporting the training and progression of some of our most dedicated cadets. Simulation technologies are a wonderful way of putting cadets into a virtual cockpit where they can learn nearly all of the functional elements of an aircraft that they are unlikely to be able to get near to the controls. Seeing industry willing to help in the education and development of our cadets is testament to a spirit of collaboration that will deliver the aviators of the future that industry and our armed forces need.’’    A huge thank you to Lockheed Martin for their support!

We had a fantastic day yesterday at the National Air & Space Camp Industry Day! We were extremely proud to be able to sponsor elements of the camp and the Industry Day and it was fantastic to meet so many amazing cadets and volunteers. It was a great opportunity to explain more about the Air Cadet Charity and the work we are doing to support aviation, adventure training, exploiting technology, immersive training, enhancing education, improving employability, health & wellbeing, and welfare. It was also great to meet some of the industry partners that work alongside us to support the Royal Air Force Air Cadets (RAFAC). Collaborations like this with c-learning and the Sustainability Academy help us in achieving our aims and ambitions for the benefit of the cadets and volunteers who support them. It was also lovely to be able to say thank you in person to Matthew Wakefield MBA and Serco for their kind donation to the Air Cadet Charity which enables us to fund some of the Google management licences as part of RAFAC's sustainable initiative. A special thanks also to Jason E. Carver at RedboxVR who arranged the loan of their prototype flight simulator for us to demo on the day. It certainly proved very popular with the cadets and some of the adults also got in on the action too!

We are so excited to be sponsoring this and can't wait to see you all there!!!

It's great to be working together with Serco and Royal Air Force Air Cadets on this amazing and worthwhile initiative! Thank you Serco for the very kind donation towards the licensing, it's support like this from industry partners that helps us to continue funding initiatives like this and open up more opportunities for Cadets.

What a great opportunity for cadets, we are so excited to be funding the registration fees for cadets to undertake this amazing new qualification and can’t wait to see where this opportunity can take them!

It’s great to see these being put to work and in the hands of some very talented cadets! We can’t wait to see them in action at RIAT and how they inspire the next generation of engineers 🤖.

We are proud to be supporting this initiative and hope that by funding the Chromebooks, Cadets can have equal opportunities when undertaking the qualifications on offer. We look forward to hearing the feedback from the Cadets and how we can continue to support them in the future!

Last night we had the official launch event for the Air Cadet Charity where we shared our journey so far into transforming what was the Air Training Corps General Purposes Fund into an independent grant-making charity supporting the Royal Air Force Air Cadets. As part of this transformation, we held a nationwide competition for cadets to design our new logo and it was great to be able to share this last night and hear from the winning cadet, Max Robinson. It really brings home how amazing and talented this group of young people are and why the Air Cadet Charity team, Jess Gilbert, Graham Bowerman, Mark O., Victoria Gridley, Stuart Ensor, Sir David Tweedie, Norman Murray, Oliver Jones-Davies, Mike Neville, Angela Curtis, Hetna Patel feel privileged to work alongside them. A huge thank you to CCLA Investment Management who kindly hosted the event for us and to all who joined us for the evening, we look forward to what we can achieve by working together in the future.  A special thanks as well to Samuel Dean and the Team Lewis Foundation for the fabulous video!