Where was Masters of the Air shot? The real airfields and towns behind the Norfolk base

Masters of the Air — the nine-part Apple TV+ series from executive producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman, adapted from Donald L. Miller's 2007 book — is set almost entirely at Thorpe Abbotts, the Norfolk airfield where the 100th Bomb Group flew from in 1943. Filming, which began in spring 2021 on a reported $250 million budget, never went to Norfolk at all. The real Thorpe Abbotts barely exists anymore, so the production built its own.

The £5 million airbase in Buckinghamshire

The series' Thorpe Abbotts was constructed at Newland Park, a Grade II listed country estate near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire — also home to the Chiltern Open Air Museum — on grounds that previously held a disused university campus and hotel. The build reportedly cost around £5 million: Nissen huts, wartime outbuildings, and imported US Army vehicles, assembled into a working replica of a 1943 bomber station. The site was chosen for the same reason the original airfields went where they did — flat, open, untouched green land. As Caroline Comer of the site's developer told the Bucks Free Press, the appeal was its

"natural untouched surroundings and wide-open green spaces."

For runway work — B-17s taxiing and landing — the production used Dalton Barracks in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, the former RAF Abingdon. Studio and effects-heavy flying sequences were based at Bovingdon Airfield Studios in Hertfordshire, itself a genuine wartime Eighth Air Force base that also served Band of Brothers.

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The towns playing Norfolk

• Bledlow, Buckinghamshire — dressed as a 1940s Norfolk village; the Lions of Bledlow pub became the "Kings Head," complete with a Bullards Ales sign and a village-green signpost pointing to the real Norfolk villages of Dickleburgh, Thorpe Abbotts, and Burston.
• Hemel Hempstead Old Town, Hertfordshire — its High Street was converted into bombed-out streets with sandbagged air-raid shelters and vintage military vehicles.
• Oxford — Catte Street, Radcliffe Square, and the Bodleian Library appear in Crosby's Oxford sequences, playing themselves.
• The Hinds Head, Bray — the Michelin-starred pub got a 1940s makeover for the series.
• A Buckinghamshire farm — stood in for occupied Belgium.

The real Thorpe Abbotts

The actual RAF Thorpe Abbotts sits four miles east of Diss, Norfolk, built in 1942–43 by John Laing & Son and handed to the US Army Air Forces as the Eighth Air Force ballooned — part of the "Friendly Invasion" that put some 350,000 Americans into East Anglia, up to 3,500 per base. The 100th flew 306 missions from there and dropped over 19,000 tons of bombs, earning the "Bloody Hundredth" nickname the hard way. The runways are largely gone, which is why filming there was never an option — but the restored control tower now houses the 100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum, and visitors can climb to the same viewing platform the show's characters use.

Production designer Chris Seagers, who grew up in the region, told The Daily Beast that as kids

"they were just great places to mess about on" — the disused airfields were simply part of the East Anglian landscape.

Which is the neat irony of the whole shoot: to recreate a place children later played on, the production built a brand-new one for adults to play on — 150 miles away, in the wrong county, and accurate to the rivet.

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