Update, 9 September: With Time Machine Designs preparing fixes ahead of a Marketplace listing, we’re bringing this one back to the front page. RAF Kenley 1940 is available now directly from the Time Machine Designs site, and it remains an MSFS 2020 release for now, with a native 2024 version to follow. Captain’s Club members: your 15% discount is closing this week, and the code is on your member dashboard.
If you have ever wanted to fly RAF Kenley exactly as it stood on the morning it was nearly wiped off the map, today is the day. Time Machine Designs has released RAF Kenley 1940, and the release date is no accident. The scenery recreates the Surrey fighter station at dawn on 18th August 1940, and it is out on 18th August 2026, the 86th anniversary of the raid it depicts.
One thing needs to come first, because it decides whether this release is for you today. RAF Kenley 1940 is out for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 only. Founder and Creative Director Richard Blows says the number of changes made to the default EGKN meant a 2020 release was the only reliable option at launch, and that the scenery will need a major rebuild before it runs properly in MSFS 2024. If you have moved across to 2024 for good, this is one to keep an eye on rather than buy right now.
One specific morning
86 years ago, on 18th August 1940, a day now remembered as the Battle of Britain’s Hardest Day, both the RAF and the Luftwaffe took their heaviest single-day losses of the campaign. Kenley was one of the primary targets. Just after midday, a low-level raid caused heavy damage across the station and cost lives among RAF personnel, local civilians and the German aircrew. RAF Kenley 1940 captures the hours before that, with the station at full readiness and both resident squadrons at dispersal.
What’s in it
The developer says the release includes over 200 custom models of buildings, aircraft, vehicles and objects, with every station building, dispersal and blast pen reconstructed from Air Ministry plans. Static Spitfires from 64 Squadron and Hurricanes from 615 Squadron sit in their correct areas, alongside three Magisters used as station hacks. Each model carries a unique code, and the serials match aircraft known to have been at Kenley that day. There is even the Blenheim that force-landed at the station on 29th July and was destroyed in the raid three weeks later.
Around the aircraft, Time Machine Designs has placed period station vehicles including refuellers, crash tenders, Tillys and staff cars, along with the airfield’s defences: anti-aircraft positions and the Parachute and Cable system that was actually fired against the 18th August raid. The team has also replaced the default trees and vegetation inside the airfield perimeter to match 1940 aerial photographs.
The research behind it follows the same pattern as the team’s earlier work. The developer lists original Air Ministry plans and building drawings from the RAF Museum, aerial photographs held by the Imperial War Museums, the National Archives and the RAF Museum, and three key texts: Alfred Price’s The Hardest Day, Hammond Innes’ wartime memoir Attack Alarm, and Peter Flint’s RAF Kenley. The team also credits the volunteers at Kenley Revival, who shared their archive and hosted a research visit to the site.
For group flying, each squadron area has six blast pen parking spaces set aside for multiplayer scrambles, which makes a co-ordinated anniversary sortie a real option for anyone still on 2020 today.
As with the freeware Grange Aerodrome 1917 we covered in July, the development team included students from boomsatsuma and early-career creative technologists. It is a model the studio has used across its recent projects.
Price, availability and what’s next
RAF Kenley 1940 is available now direct from the Time Machine Designs site for £9.95, as an instant download for MSFS 2020. Captain’s Club members get 15% off through mid-September, with the code waiting in member accounts. Sign up now to get this and other member perks!
The developer also wanted to thank Linda Duffield, Neil Broughton and Tony Adams from Kenley Revival, whose knowledge and archive material fed into the project.
There is more to come for Kenley. An update is already in the works to populate the station with aircrew, groundcrew and WAAFs, and a version set in March 1943, for the Spitfire V and IX, is on the cards. Blows also points to more historic airfields in the pipeline, which fits the roadmap the studio has been talking about this year.
For now, the interesting part is the timing. If you are on MSFS 2020, you can spend today flying over Kenley as it looked on the exact morning, 86 years ago, before the raid arrived.
