Written in the form of a first-person narrative of events that transpired in a single year following an April dinner party
to celebrate Roy’s twenty-first birthday,
The Aerodrome is a study of his ambivalence when confronted with the dilemmas that have to be faced at the juncture of adolescence and adulthood and when traditional, unquestioned ways are confronted by new and appealing ones that demand acceptance or rejection almost immediately.
The narrative opens with Roy, who has been told that his "parents" are actually his guardians, recovering from a drinking binge that followed the Rector’s revelation. On his return to the rectory, he overhears the Rector confessing to having killed a fellow divinity student, Anthony, because of jealousy, while on a mountaineering excursion twenty-two years earlier. (Anthony had been offered the
village benefice and had gained the affection of the girl whom both courted.)
On the following day, the Rector, his wife, Roy, the Squire, and the Squire’s sister, Florence, attend the local agricultural fair where the Flight-Lieutenant mischievously lets loose the Squire’s prize bull, Slazenger, and kills the Rector while demonstrating a machine gun that has been inadvertently loaded with live ammunition. Meanwhile, Roy has sex with Bess, the innkeeper’s daughter.
At the Rector’s funeral, the Air Vice-Marshal announces his plan for taking over the village, converting the Manor into an officers’ club, and appointing the Flight-Lieutenant as village padre. Roy decides to abandon his plans for a career in the civil service, to join the air force, and to marry Bess. The new padre marries them clandestinely. The Squire, who is wholly disconsolate at the loss of the Manor and its lands, which was for generations the center of the village’s life, dies after apparently trying to tell Roy something about the young man’s origins. Bess’s mother, Eva, aware of how close Roy and her daughter have become, advises Roy that a marriage between the two is impossible because they are siblings (Bess was born to her while she was a maid in the rectory, she says, and Roy was born five months after his parents’ marriage and before they moved to the village—hence, the Rector’s claim at the dinner party that the innkeeper’s wife had asked them to rear a foundling.) Roy is dumbfounded and wanders by a tin hut in the fields below the aerodrome where he and Bess consummated their marriage; he discovers Bess and the Flight-Lieutenant having sex. Questioning reveals that they first had sex the day before Bess got married; Roy decides, however, that despite their presumed consanguinity, he loves Bess and will never leave her.
After his induction into the air force, Roy attends chapel, where the Air Vice-Marshal addresses recent recruits and presents his philosophy and program: Parenthood, ownership, love, and locality represent the past and the feudal, inefficient, and bumbling ways of the Village; sex, freedom, necessity, and power—by contrast—represent the Aerodrome and the future. Roy thereupon enters into a liaison with Eustasia, the young wife of the elderly chief mathematician of the Aerodrome and the former mistress of the Flight-Lieutenant, among others. Roy gains rapid preferment as private secretary to the Air Vice-Marshal but becomes increasingly alienated from his superior’s philosophy.
At a chapel service, the Flight-Lieutenant (in the role of rector) says that the Village was better off before the Aerodrome came; the Air Vice-Marshal closes the chapel and arrests and then demotes the Flight-Lieutenant to mechanic. In the furor in the chapel, the late Squire’s sister, Florence, while rushing to defend the rector (whom she identifies as "my boy"), is shot dead by the Air Vice-Marshal.
Eustasia informs Roy that she is pregnant; Bess has a mental breakdown and is treated by Dr. Faulkner, who has ties to both the Village and the Aerodrome. Eustasia and the former Flight-Lieutenant, reconciled, are killed in a car accident engineered by the Air Vice-Marshal; he, in turn, is killed when his airplane crashes because a wing on which the demoted Flight-Lieutenant had worked collapses.
In a confrontation immediately before the airplane accident, Dr. Faulkner and the Rector’s widow, addressing the Air Vice-Marshal as Anthony, reveal the complicated relationships of the principal characters. The Rector’s attempt to murder his friend, Anthony, more than twenty years earlier, was unsuccessful; unbeknown to the Rector, Dr. Faulkner nursed him back to health. Roy’s mother, pregnant with Anthony’s child, then married the Rector, though she did not love him, and he, in consequence, made love to Eva, the innkeeper’s wife, who was then the Rector’s housemaid, and became the father of Bess (who, it thus turns out, is not Roy’s sister). Meanwhile, Anthony had an affair with the Squire’s sister, Florence, who bore him a son, the Flight-Lieutenant.
In the words of Anthony, the Air Vice-Marshal, "what a record of confusion, deception, rankling hatred, low aims, indecision!"