RAF Gan
| RAF Gan | |||||||||||
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En Route
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| Summary | |||||||||||
| Airport type | Military | ||||||||||
| Owner | Ministry of Defence | ||||||||||
| Location | Gan island, Maldives | ||||||||||
| Built | 1957 | ||||||||||
| In use | 1957-1 April 1976 | ||||||||||
| Elevation AMSL | 6 ft / 2 m | ||||||||||
| Coordinates | 00°41′29″S 073°09′22″E / 0.69139°S 73.15611°ECoordinates: 00°41′29″S 073°09′22″E / 0.69139°S 73.15611°E | ||||||||||
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 RAF Gan
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Royal Air Force Station Gan commonly known as RAF Gan, is a former Royal Air Force station on Gan Island, the southern-most island of Addu Atoll which is part of the larger groups of islands which form the Maldives, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The airfield is now Gan International Airport.
The area was originally established as a military base for the Royal Navy in 1941. Royal Navy engineers began constructing airstrips on Gan island in August 1941 for the Fleet Air Arm.
During World War II, in 1942 the RAF had its bases in the Islands of Addu Atoll, Maldives. The RAF first had a presence on Hithadoo in 1942 when a detachment of RAF personnel were sent from RAF China Bay in Ceylon to service and turn around the RAF Short Sunderland and PBY Catalina flying boats that were flying regularly into the Addu Atoll lagoon. At the end of the war, all military installations were either removed or abandoned.
In 1957 the Royal Air Force needed a staging post between its bases in the Middle East and Far East and the location was virtually limited to Gan, and so Royal Air Force Station Gan became established in the late 1950s as a stopover on the reinforcement route to the Far East Air Force based in Singapore. The previous reinforcement route had passed through countries that had formerly been British territory but were now independent, and sometimes hostile nations. RAF Mauripur, to the west of Karachi, by then a Pakistan Air Force station, had RAF personnel attached for staging airfield purposes up until 1956, when the staging role between the Middle East and Far East fell to RAF Gan.
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