The Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine was a Royal Air Force aviation medicine research unit active between 1945 and 1994. It was first located at Farnborough Airfield in Hampshire, and was successor to the wartime RAF Physiological Laboratory. The Institute conducted theoretical and applied reseach in support of flying personnel with divisions for acceleration, altitude, biochemistry, biophysics, personal equipment and teaching. The IAM obtained a decompression chamber (moved from the Physiological Laboratory) in 1945, supplemented by a climatic chamber in 1952, and a human centrifuge in 1955 (the latter facility is still in operation and was designated a Grade 2 Listed Building in August 2007). Additionally, the Institute was responsible for a number of mobile decompression chambers and the training of operators for chambers deployed at certain RAF operational stations with the object of familiarising flying personnel with the effects of annoxia at operational altitudes. The IAM became a world leading centre for aviation medicine research in the 1960s and 1970s, gaining additional facilities, and continuing an active flight research programme that commenced in World War II. Research into protection against the effects of high altitude, high G force, heat and cold stress, noise and vibration, sleep and wakefulness, spatial disorientation, vision, aviation psychology and human error, and aircraft accident investigation dominated activities at the IAM. Much work was done to develop and improve aircrew life support equipment. The IAM ceased to exist in 1994, when many research staff and facilities were transferred to the DERA Centre for Human Sciences.

John Billingham was born on 18 March 1930 in Worcester, and after earning a degree in physiology at Oxford University, he started clinical studies at Guy’s Hospital in London, qualifying in 1954. He also attended meetings of the British Interplanetary Society. In 1956 Billingham joined the Royal Air Force as a medical officer, training as a surgeon and rising to the rank of squadron leader. His research at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine in Farnborough was particularly focused on climatic physiology, and included the impact of heat stress on pilots. In 1963 Billingham joined NASA after being headhunted from the Institute becoming the head of environment physiology at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was hired to improve space suit design, with an early project being to develop water cooled underwear which the RAF Insitute had already been long working on. In 1965 Billingham moved to Ames Research Center, where he led the first comprehensive study on a permanent lunar laboratory. He was eventually named chief of the Life Sciences division. He supported the search for intelligent and microbial extraterrestrial life with a major programme including workshops, research, papers, and a major conference in 1979 later published as a book, Life in the Universe.

Worked for the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine, Farnborough.