The family Dactylopteridae comprises seven valid species mostly distributed in tropical and subtropical seas (Eschmeyer and Fong, 2013). The flying gurnard Dactylopterus volitans (Linnaeus, 1758) is present in the Eastern Atlantic, apparently from the North Sea to Angola, including the entire Mediterranean Sea and the Azores, and in the Western Atlantic, from Canada to Argentina (Froese and Pauly, 2013). It is the only species of the family Dactylopteridae present in the European Atlantic (from 36 degrees N to 66 degrees N) (Roux, 1986; Quero et al., 2003). The point map of D. volitans given in FishBase (Froese and Pauly, 2013) showed a single record in the Bay of Biscay and a single record point in the Southern North Sea, although the latter seems to be an estimation, not a real observation. This paper reports the first record of D. volitans in the Eastern English Channel.