30/10/2026
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Air Vice-Marshal Jo Lincoln MBE
On 13 October 2025, Air Vice-Marshal Jo Lincoln did something unusual for an officer of her seniority: after 28 years of regular service in the Royal Air Force, she left it, attested into the Royal Auxiliary Air Force as a part-time volunteer reservist, and took command of the entire reserve force she had just joined. As Commandant General of the RAuxAF and Director Reserves RAF, succeeding Air Vice-Marshal Ranald Munro, she now leads the part-time force from inside it. It is a career loop almost nobody gets to close, and it was built on a trade the RAF has always depended on but rarely celebrated. Jo Lincoln is a logistics officer, and she joined the RAF in 1997 after graduating with an honours degree in Business Administration, with Spanish, to become an expert in the unglamorous business of moving and sustaining air power.
Her deployments read like the map of Britain's wars at the turn of the century: Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. She served with United States Transportation Command and was the first British detachment commander for 906 Expeditionary Air Wing in the Middle East. In August 2019 she took on one of the RAF's most demanding ground jobs, Station Commander at RAF Wittering combined with command of the A4 Force Elements, the specialist engineering and logistics squadrons that keep the RAF's aircraft flying and exercises supplied at home and abroad, with units on almost every RAF station. Her tenure included the pandemic, during which Wittering made a significant contribution to the government's response while holding its defence commitments. She was promoted to air commodore in July 2021, took on workforce and recruiting portfolios at Headquarters Air Command, and in October 2023 moved to the Permanent Joint Headquarters as Assistant Chief of Staff for personnel and logistics. Throughout, her own account of command stayed the same: she said that being an effective leader meant keeping a good team around you, and she called the Wittering years "an absolute privilege", crediting the workforce, the contractors and the local communities of Wittering, Stamford, Peterborough, Rutland and Leicester. She holds the MBE.
Lincoln's appointment is a statement about what the RAF thinks its reserves are for. She has been the regular in the system and the reservist joining it, the station commander who ran a base through a pandemic and the logistician who spent a career proving that air power is really ground power wearing wings. Air forces remember their pilots; they are flown by their logisticians. Few careers have made that case as plainly as hers: the officer who spent 28 years moving the kit, feeding the machine and keeping the airfield open, and who then walked out of the regular service straight back into uniform to lead the volunteers who will do it next.
