Now It Can Be Told | Wing Commander Ronald Adams

Wing Commander Ronald Adams vividly brings to life the activities of the staff who gathered information about sightings of enemy aircraft and gave the orders to 'scramble'. Among other things, he talks about how Operations Rooms didn't exist in World War I, the various code words they used in communicating with pilots, the limitations of radar, working while the aerodrome was being bombed and how close they came to defeat in the Battle of Britain.

Modern air-traffic control systems still use many of the terms developed during this period. Transponder codes, for example, are known as squawks. The origin of this is the instruction to 'squawk your parrot', which was a direction from the control room to the fighter plane to turn on its transponder so that it could be located and plotted on a map. The transponders would then emit an identification signal known as a parrot, which would identify the plane as friendly.