The Spitfire - an appreciation (75th anniversary)

The Scotsman ^ | 06 March 2011 | George Kerevan

[sukhoi-30mki]

The Spitfire - - an appreciation

By George Kerevan

75 years ago today, as darkness loomed across Europe, an achingly beautiful aircraft soared into the heavens on its maiden flight. The plane would become both an eight-gunned instrument of freedom and a near-spiritual symbol of it. The Spitfire was born.

AT 4:35pm on the afternoon of 5 March, 1936, a pilot called Joseph 'Mutt' Summers walked across the grass of Southampton Airport - currently a hub for Flybe. Summers had spent a tiring day testing a new RAF bomber. Now, he had to squeeze in the first flight of a new fighter called the "Spitfire". A plane that would become a legend and - arguably - hold the pass in 1940 long enough to save us from fascism.

But in 1936, the conventional wisdom in Britain was that "the bomber would always get through". Many considered new fighter planes like the Spitfire a waste of money.

Mutt Summers pressed the starter button and the Spitfire took to the air for the first time. Unlike the wood and canvass biplanes then serving as the RAF's frontline fighters, the Spit was a monoplane of all-metal construction. It had a retractable undercarriage and a fantastic speed of over 350mph. In combat it would be armed with eight machine guns. At last, here was something that would stop any bomber.

The Spitfire was the inspired creation of a true engineering genius, Reginald Joseph Mitchell. He was born in 1895, the son of two Stoke-on-Trent primary school teachers. His poor background precluded university, so he began an

[Pelham]

“people would be shocked just how little ordinance was carried by a B-17. But when you have thousands of them in one raid “

My 90 year old dad was a 2nd Lt in the 7th Army in WWII. When they were in France he saw thousands of bombers flying overhead, on their way to Germany I suppose. An impressive sight, he tells me.

He was with the corps anti aircraft artillery. They had radar to acquire targets and electric drives on their 90 mm guns to track them. A couple of times they spotted a German plane bearing in but the electric drive couldn’t keep up with it. Their first introduction to the world of jets.