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a raid by aircraft, especially for bombing a particular area.
Contemporary Examples

Without an Iron Dome defense system, air raid sirens or even bomb shelters, people resign themselves to their fate.
A Child’s Funeral in Gaza Jesse Rosenfeld July 17, 2014

Among them was the neighbor who had insisted that the air raid shelter be searched for survivors.
Life Under Air Strikes: Children Under Fire Will Never Forget — or Forgive Clive Irving August 2, 2014

Half an hour after I had returned to my old apartment from Jaffa, an air raid siren went off.
How I Got Used to Gaza Rockets Miranda Frum July 8, 2014

So for us, this air raid siren heralded a new experience, an unwelcome initiation into the conflict.
Sheltered In Jerusalem Gil Troy November 16, 2012

Historical Examples

I’m sure he felt magnetically that Dierdre O’Farrell shrank from a reference to her part in the night air raid.
Everyman’s Land C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

A woman was taken to an asylum a raving lunatic after an air raid.
The Modern Pistol and How to Shoot It Walter Winans

The case has been reported of a Stepney child which has developed a disease of the brain, as the result of an air raid.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 Various

“A good night for a German air raid,” said one of the officers.
Now It Can Be Told Philip Gibbs

If noiseless firearms were invented nobody would pay the least attention to an air raid except the people actually struck.
The Modern Pistol and How to Shoot It Walter Winans

The air raid was over at 10, so our patients were allowed to return.
My Diary in Serbia: April 1, 1915-Nov. 1, 1915 Monica M. Stanley

noun

an attack by hostile aircraft
(as modifier): an air-raid shelter

n.

1914, from air (n.1) + raid (n.); originally in reference to British attacks Sept. 22, 1914, on Zeppelin bases at Cologne and Düsseldorf in World War I. The German word is Fliegerangriff “aviator-attack,” and if Old English had survived into the 20th century our word instead might be fleogendeongrype.

One didn’t dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end. [Hans Erich Nossack, “Der Untergang,” 1942]