Ya don't say...
Posted on 03/06/2011 7:12:13 PM PST by 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
(Excerpt) Read more at living.scotsman.com ...
My great grandmother said she saw the new Liberators fly over pretty much every day while she was working in her victory garden.
To me the Spitfire is the the most aesthetically beautiful aircraft that has ever existed!
Second most is the Chance - Vought F4U Corsair.
Alain DeCadenet. His fairly attractive daughter had been married to John Taylor of Duran Duran.
Sadly the Spit and the Battle of Britain was largely waste as they largely surrender to Islam like America is doing.
Ya don't say...
I believe that research would prove that you are correct.
Agreed. I was going to comment that the Spitfire is one of the coolest-sounding planes I've ever heard.
I watch the Battle of Britain every chance I get. Don’t even care about the “love angle†of the movie. I watch to see the Hurricanes and Spitfires in action.But even above them I think the Mustang was the sexiest and best aircraft of WW2.
Hahaha, great article, I remember seeing
"the first of the few" when I was a kid.
Oh, you got to love the Scotsman the only place
that has whisky as a category.
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Newsletters Advertise Monday, 7th March 2011
On the website dedicated to General Robert L. Scott, there is the sound of a P-40 Allison engine roaring over. It is one of the most throaty yet beautiful sounds one can imagine.
They achieved that speed and more in DIVES. It is officially recorded, so you can look up the pilots and the dates and records. Spitfires were used for research that later resulted in breaking the sound barrier.
...The nearest the non-pilot will ever get to what it felt like to sit alone in the cockpit of a Spit is a poem by John Gillespie Magee, a Scots-Irish American who came to Britain in 1941 to fight the Nazis:
“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth;
“And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
“Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth;
“Of sun-lit clouds - and done a hundred things;
“You have not dreamed of…
“And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod;
“The high untrespassed sanctity of space;
“Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”
On 11 December, 1941, Magee was killed when his parachute failed to open. He was 19. At a time when the RAF is being cut to shreds, we should remember the Spit. But we should also remember the men and women who built it and flew it.
At the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, one of the more interesting displays to me are a bunch of aircraft engines cut away so you can see how they operate.
It was interesting to me that the old V-12 etc. piston engines were far more complex than the jets.
Those young guys could not have realized the weight of their stones. Therefore, they became airborne. That's why it's called glory.
I remember reading that the Spit cockpit as small
as it was, was spacious compared to a 109.
What was always amazing to me was some of the Wright
radials that would still run missing a cylinder or TWO.
It’s funny that a Griffon engined Spitfire is part of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.
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