RCAF. Wing 424 Cornwall District, (240 Water St. West) is holding the 69th Commemoration of the Battle of Britain, on Sunday Sept. 13, 2009 at 2 p.m. where Wing Commander Geoff Yapp BSc RAF will be the guest speaker. All are welcome!
Wing Commander Geoff Yapp was born near London in 1958 and joined the RAF in 1978. The first half of his RAF career was spent as an air defence navigator on a variety of RAF fighter flying appointments, and following two MoD tours around London he has since served in overseas staff tours with NATO and the USAF.
Operational and instructional flying tours on F-4 Phantom sqns in England, Scotland and Germany involved deployment to Ascension Island and the Falkland Islands in 1982, support of the Gulf War in 1991 and 6 months in California in 1984 accepting and delivering the RAF’s F-4J(UK)s. When RAF Wildenrath was closed in 1992 and its Phantoms scrapped Geoff moved south for a season as the commander of the RAF’s Winter Survival School in Bavaria.
In 1992 he returned to England for two back-to-back tours in procurement support of what are now the Typhoon, JCA and Future Carrier programmes and the research for their through life update technologies.
Geoff was posted to the NATO Joint Command North in Stavanger, Norway in 1998, initially in the air operations branch, but after promotion to Wing Commander in 2000 in the exercise and training branch with special responsibility for the introduction to NATO of the former Soviet Baltic States. These were turbulent years in the Balkans and Geoff deployed twice, firstly as an air LNO to the Romanian AOC in Timosoira, and then with the rest of the Stavanger HQ to Pristina in Kosovo where he was KFOR liaison officer to the Presevo Valley negotiations in Serbia.
Another NATO tour, this time at the Air Component HQ in Ramstein Germany followed in 2003, where Geoff was the chief of the air plans branch. Shortly after his arrival Ramstein was charged with developing an air plan for ISAF in Afghanistan and over the next 3 years Geoff led the large multi-national planning teams with numerous trips into theatre and around the world, including a 4 month tour as the Military Assistant to the ISAF Deputy Commander in Kabul.
In 2006 the Yapp family moved to Elmendorf AFB, Alaska in the RAF exchange officer post to NORAD’s Alaska Command, where Geoff held operational duty as the chief of combat operations in the NORAD AOC, and also doubled as the head of the training and exercise branch. He left Anchorage in May 2009 to travel overland to Ottawa where Geoff took up his new post as Naval and Air Advisor to the British High Commission.
Wing Commander Yapp is married to Carol, an ex-RAF officer herself. They have three sons, Chris who is in his last year at Nottingham University, and James and Alexander who are at school in Ottawa
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