HERCULES TRAGEDY: RAF Lyneham has been involved in some of the world's major conflicts, its history entwined with that of the Hercules aircraft based there.

It is currently home to around 50 Hercules transport aircraft and 2,500 personnel.

The station opened as Number 33 Maintenance Unit on May 18, 1940. There were just four officers, one other rank and 15 civilians.

During the next few months the unit swelled and by the end of the year there were 422 civilians, 18 officers and 181 other ranks.

At first the airfield was a grass landing area and work had not even started on hard runways when the base was opened.

In September 1940, an enemy aircraft dropped three bombs on the base, killing five civilian workmen and destroying a building.

On May 1, 1949, the first of the permanent barrack blocks was opened to replace the basic huts.

In 1976, Lyneham became the largest operational base in the RAF when the Hercules aircraft of Number 70 Squadron arrived. In the 1980s, the biggest operation was the station's involvement in the Falklands crisis.

In 1984, famine relief flights were made to help the starving in war-torn Ethiopia and they continued until November 1985.

In the early 1990s, former Beirut hostages Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Jackie Mann took their first steps on British soil after their release when they stepped off a plane at Lyneham.

One of Lyneham's biggest operations began on August 6, 1990, when the Kuwait crisis began. Many staff were dispatched overseas, including to Germany, Cyprus, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The base subsequently mounted relief operations in Somalia and Rwanda.

Considering the hundreds of thousands of air miles the Hercules fly, there have been few major crashes.

The aircraft has an unrivalled safety record throughout the world of aviation. But almost inevitably because of its many hours of flying, accidents do happen.

The most disastrous crash was November 9, 1971 and is on record as one of the worst accidents to happen in the history of the RAF.

After an early morning take off from Pisa, a Hercules from 24 Squadron plunged into the sea off the coast of Italy killing its six crew and the 46 Italian paratroopers it was carrying.

The aircraft had been flying in formation as part of an exercise when it suddenly pealed away and exploded as it hit the water.

Two years earlier six crew members died when a Hercules from 30 Squadron crashed into a field close to the end of the runway at RAF Fairford.

The aircraft burst into flames on impact with the ground.

Nine people aboard a Hercules from 70 Squadron also died when their plane crashed into a Scottish mountainside while on a routine low flying exercise in May 1993.