Royal Air Force Regimental Tartan

This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern BBWBWBKBBBW.

Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 11 stripe tartan.

Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=2123

Provenance

Earliest known date: 1988 The Royal Air Force initially declined to approve this tartan for members of the Air Services. However the tartan was worn by Scottish ex-servicemen and those who have served in Scotland and became quite popular. In 2002 it was officially adopted by the RAF.

Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
source
House of Tartan
data captured from
https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/house-of-tartan/data.csv
data date
1988 (this record)
licence
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence

  1. House of Tartan
    the weaver/retailer's database — the site is now offline; the URL is kept as the ultimate source's identity
  2. thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
    Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from
  3. this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
    each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources

Thread count

W/8 DBi16 DR6 DBi50 K26 DB8 LB58 DBi6 LB16 DBi4 DR/6

One full sett is 394 threads.

Sett

Palette

ColourShadeOKLCh
LB#B5BBDE #B5BBDEoklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6)
DB#2C2C80 #2C2C80oklch(35.0% 0.138 276.6)
DB#1C0070 #1C0070oklch(26.3% 0.162 277.1)
DR#55120C #55120Coklch(30.0% 0.099 29.3)
K#000000 #000000oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0)
W#F7F7F7 #F7F7F7oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9)

Sample pattern

W/8 DBi16 DR6 DBi50 K26 DB8 LB58 DBi6 LB16 DBi4 DR/6 tartan

Nearest tartan variants

The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.

Neighbour map

Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.

Air ForceGYL (Personal)GYL family (Personal)Queen Margaret UniversityDiana Princess of Wales Memorial, TheHek (Name)U.S. Forces ThursoMadras College (Corporate)Minnesota DressMinnesota Dress American District Tartangroundcomplexity

ID: /variants/s11/w4dbi8dr3dbi25k13db4lb29dbi3lb8dbi2dr3x2dbi1406275-db1106275/

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