The Editor, Richard Gardner, interviews Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, KCB, ADC, BSc, FRAeS, CCMI, RAF, Chief of the Air Staff.

As the Royal Air Force enters its 92nd year as one of the best equipped and most operationally active air arms in the world, it is facing a future that is far from clear. By the end of the year it is expected that a new, and long overdue, Strategic Defence Review should provide a re-adjustment in policy to reflect changing circumstances but nobody is expecting defence funding, as a proportion of GDP, to be restored to the higher level that was in place when the last SDR set out its priorities.

British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers has arranged for the President’s travelling medal of office to accompany him into space during STS-132 currently scheduled to launch on 14 May for a 12-day mission to the International Space Station. This will be Space Shuttle Atlantis’s final flight.