<p>The Royal Air Force is synonymous with its heroic achievements in the summer of 1940, when Winston Churchill's 'famous few' - the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots of RAF Fighter Command - held Goering's Luftwaffe at bay in the Battle of Britain, thereby changing the course of the war. For much of the twentieth century, warplanes were fixed in the world's imagination, a symbol of the perils and excitements of the modern er...