I miss a great airplay for tide turning it's not a difficult airplane to fly at all it built up an aura that has never been achieved by any other aircraft in world history the spitfire has got all the credit because of all this romantic mythologizing but actually it was the humble old hurricane that carried the day it seems to stand out more than the hurricane actually done it this will battle represent concern in this small fighter is possibly the most vital weapon that Britain in all its long history has produced it's a Spitfire in June 1941 of 700 it will soon be lost in the first decisive battle to be fought in the air the Battle of Britain the Spitfire would fight the contemporary German Messerschmitt in many ways a similar machine the one produced from very different motives those finally synchronize hopefully we committed to date they had hardly tested each other in a matter of weeks the courage and skill of the young pilots the technology the ability of designers and engineers of both countries would all be tested to the ultimate limit both the me-109 and the spitfire were of course killing machines the difference being of the German fighter looked at the Spitfire having a refined air which somehow placed it above the vulgar havoc of war [Music] then came the 10th of May and blitzkrieg [Music] but general they gonna call the Battle of France Dino I expected the Battle of Britain in about to begin those surreal might of the enemy very soon returned on us Hitler knows that you will have to break us in this island always do [Music] the Battle of Britain fought during the long summer of 1940 is to be the first attempt at subjugation by air power alone [Music] the German pilots are competent many like Verner Mulder's soon to be an ace with a hundred kills have learned their grim trade over Spain Poland the Low Countries and France [Music] the 15th of August 1940 at Lata eagle day over 1200 fighters rise like mayflies from the meadows of northern France [Music] [Music] 1800 bombers hang calls Yonkers and dawnia's escorted by the measure Smith's take off and set course for England the RAF though outnumbered has the benefit of radar and accurate ground control but the Luftwaffe has yet to taste defeat the outcome of the battle lies in the hands of the young fighter pilots [Music] restaurant 1 187 sugar 1 1 87 or even zero intercept raid bosses I got my site onto one bomber and gave him a long bear he traded my spy on him he went down in flames the dogfight going up there there are four five six machine in a teepee yeah we were taking them in and out of the path the flash and the puzzle Smith mr. Dave Lee and I got in a lovely vs. machine gun fire it's just the German pilot so much that they immediately break for me oh boy I never seen anything so good a surface the RAF fighters was really coffee is boys day but it's sight so what is better my gun it flew off one of my little the RAF is not smashed the invasion postponed indefinitely a legend is created the legend of the RAF fighter pilots peacetime Playboy's who flying a dwindling handful of Spitfires against impossible odds have saved the free world by routing the Luftwaffe in its pomp the gentlemen have defeated the players yes sir he had to bail out what about you you all right did you get anything huh hang on when they got back there so impression to the sea and the crew got away in a rubber dinghy as well that's 111 definitely destroyed so three of them got away too bad yeah by the way is that wick is payment to have destroyed it two one five Air Ministry communique the biggest bag yet 185 enemy aircraft shut down the figures from both sides are proved to be exaggerated nevertheless the RAF has won a famous victory if only by the most narrow of margins during a hundred and sixteen days in 1940 curiously although the pilots the future will call them our honor it is the Spitfire fighter which like the longbow and Nelson's wooden walls is to become the symbol of Britain at war it will be useless for historians to point out that there were in fact more hurricanes flying in the battle hurricanes equipped twenty nine squadrons Spitfires only nineteen all that hurricanes shot down three times as many enemy aircraft the image of the Spitfire has captured the imagination of the public for following the Battle of Britain Spitfire funds are organized in every town and village in the country never a hurricane fundraising during the battle as Luftwaffe losses mounted even the Germans seem to be accepting the legend of the invincibility of the Spitfire general their fleet adolfo gallant Goering came out to our airfields in France he was met at us fighter pilots because he did not succeed in giving sufficient defense to our bomber squadrons against British fighters when Goering asked me what he could do about it I replied get me Spitfires for my rink such is the legend what are the facts during the Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe losses were 1733 aircraft destroyed and 643 damaged the RAF had claimed twice the number the RAF have lost 915 aircraft in combat 402 of them Spitfires the Germans have claimed over 3000 a figure far in excess of the total Aria fighter establishment the RAF have also lost 415 fighter pilots killed in action and few of those who survive the battle will survive the war contrary to legend during the battle the RAF was never short of either Spitfires or hurricanes the shortage was pilots again contrary to legend many of the pilots were sergeants it took a year to train a fighter pilot training was intensified and many pilots were transferred from the Fleet Air Arm and converted to fly hurricanes 32c switch an undercarriage lights put petrol on reserve history has not been kind to the hurricane which was not markedly inferior to the early Spitfire it was easier to fly and lap it was a better gun platform true the hurricane was not as fast so as far as possible hurricanes attacked the Bombers the faster and more agile Spitfires took on the fighters the Spitfires and hurricanes were complimentary but in 1940 and certainly today 50 years on the Spitfire stands secure as the winner of the Battle of Britain and as the supreme fighter of all time in permanent celebration of the 1940 victory Spitfires were used at many RAF stations as gate Guardians now they're glass fiber replicas the Spitfires which used to stand at the gates have been brought in from the cold either for restoration or to donate components to keep the immaculate Air Show Queens of the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight air worthy [Music] [Applause] [Music] Squadron Leader Paul de taxis a spitfire of the memorial flight at Coningsby to delight an airshow audience most of whom could not have been born when in 1941 this spitfire was the fastest fighter in the our air the origins of the spitfire began ten years earlier than that in 1931 the fastest fighters in the RAF were these most elegant Hawker fury biplanes they are the first RAF fighters to exceed 200 miles per hour in level flight powered by a 650 horsepower rolls-royce engine they have a maximum speed of 207 miles per hour and are delightful to fly [Music] at that time these two men had other ideas about the speed of RAF aircraft Sir Henry Royce and Reginald Mitchell Royce was the driving force behind the Rolls Royce car and aero engine concern Reginald Mitchell was chief designer for the Supermarine company of Woolston Southampton which specialized in the construction of flying boats Mitchell had designed a series of all-metal monoplane racing sea planes entered as the RAF high speed flight to compete for the schneider trophy an international event for sea planes which became the venue for the absolute world speed record britain had won the two previous meetings to win the trophy outright Rickman had to win the third meeting to be held at Cal shot in 1931 the Air Ministry declined to finance the three aircraft to the lasting shame of the government of the day it was left to a private citizen lady Huston to put up 100,000 pounds for the construction of the 1931 seaplanes Mitchell had designed they were built around a new 36 litre v12 supercharged rolls-royce R engine designed and developed to produce the then unheard-of figure of 2,600 horsepower this enabled the super Marines to win the schneider trophy outright and then to raise the absolute world speed record to a staggering 406 point 7 miles per hour the Supermarine was not the prototype for the Spitfire impressive though the performance of the seaplanes had undoubtedly been they were in no sense practical aircraft the sprint engines had to be stripped and overhauled after every 5 hours running in 1931 none of the RAF skräuss airfields would have been large enough for them to take off as land planes the experience gained enabled Mitchell to design and build a monoplane RAF fighter it was unofficially called Spitfire and flew in 1934 however the performance was disappointing that Spitfire was to end its days as a gunnery target back to the drawing board Mitchell revised the design with a retractable undercarriage and enclosed cockpit though still retaining the underpowered roles goshawk the Air Ministry was not enthusiastic a still later version again goshawk powered was offered it also failed to excite official interest though the elliptical wings hinted at a familiar shape to come in 1934 rolls-royce had been on the point of giving up aero engine manufacture they announced a new engine based on the record-breaking 36 litre schneider trophy arm that had been scaled down to a mere 27 liters to produce a lightweight v12 military aero engine in the 1,000 horsepower class it was to be named Merlin in 1934 it represented the world peak of Applied Technology excited by the promise of this powerful new rolls-royce engine Mitchell proposed in 1935 a final revision of his rejected monoplane it was clean and purposeful however the elliptical wings caused official disquiet for though aerodynamically efficient they would be difficult to manufacture nevertheless a 10,000 pound contract was offered for the prototype to be ready by October 1935 at hawkers a rival fighter is on the drawing board it's been designed by Sidney kam who was also responsible for the theory and it too will be a merlin powered monoplane as you know we've been thinking around this problem at some time and without any doubt it means leaving the biplane in between there so well they're going to the monoplane with heavier armament and many new features such as closed cockpit tractable undercarriage fire wing loading and of course new structural problems the biplane fury became the monoplane hurricane in 1935 600 were ordered the hurricane was an easier proposition to manufacture than the rival Spitfire it was the end of a simple wood metal and fabric technology which began with the soft widths of 1917 the Spitfire was a complex new all-metal technology the planning of Britain's new our program begins to share results preview is given a Vickers contribution to the mightier air fleet which will bring our supremacy to Britain the Spitfire takes off first this is the latest type of single seater fighter and as you can see a monoplane in design and construction she is not unlike the last night a trophy winner and she is going to be a great asset to the RAF is pretty obvious we are flying along in our own plane at about 175 so what speech is capable of you may judge from the pace at which he overtakes us July 1936 Jeffrey quill the test pilot Mitchell was in the chase plane sadly he was not to live to see his design into production for he died the following year of cancer at the early age of 42 Mitchell was succeeded by his chief draftsman Joe Smith as the Spitfire went into production Mitchell had this power not anybody a great designer but he had this essential quality that he was able to build off an extremely competent team around him and to really make it work as a team and control it and this is of course what this is a good airplane it can't be done any other way I think it tried to say that at the time not everybody believed that the Spitfire was a good airplane or even a practical airplane was a very widely Harold knew that it was far too much influenced by the the racing experience of Superman's had and that it was in fact now more or less of a sort of racehorse which was quite unsuitable for the the hurly-burly of service life and a lot of people thought it was the engineering was too difficult it couldn't be produced and it very nearly wasn't for what would become a depressingly familiar failing of British industry was soon manifest the production of the first order for 310 Spitfires fell behind schedule and went over-budget there were appalling delays because of the inability of the subcontractors to actually fabricate for example the wings of the Spitfire and and so the Spitfire was delivered to the squadrons 18 months after the Messerschmitt 109 was delivered to the German squadrons the Messerschmitt is is a sort of mercedes job in other words it entirely understands production engineering the problems of fabrication and manufacture and was designed as that from the start and therefore it is less romantic less beautiful but in its way just as effective and much more easy to produce and what people don't often realize is that the later marks of Spitfire took three times four man-hours to produce as the later marks of Messerschmitt and in particular to see the Spitfire and the Messer ship is a total difference in the philosophy of of making anything to me the Spitfire is part of British Romanticism and love her individual craftsmanship you know the beautiful thing the kind of sports car ideal and was designed by Mitchell himself with no idea whatsoever about the problems of production engineering no it wasn't designed with mass production 22000 eventually in mind at all it was an advanced airplane a thoroughbred airplane with no concessions to anything except aerodynamics and the Spitfire is a very advanced airplane for its time because it was just the start of stress skin wings and fuselage fuselage of the Spitfire never gave any problem but the wings were completely they were very thin much thinner than any previous airplane and they were elliptical to get the best aerodynamic results so they were a complicated production job and super Marines didn't do them themselves super means when the Spitfire came into production had only six hundred people by 1948 they doubled it and by the end of the war they had ten thousand spread around but the wings were subcontracted out to General aircraft to popjoy motors to press steel Akali and so they were built in various places and then brought together and they didn't all fit together so this held up things to begin with but it's unfair to say they didn't get going because they did as spitfyre production belatedly got underway in 1938 the last months of beasts were having away [Music] in a blaze of propaganda the German Messerschmitt 109 the fighter which would soon challenge the Spitfire breaks the world land plane record at 379 miles per hour [Music] it was in fact a special aircraft though the Germans claimed it only to be a slightly modified service me-109 the record-breaking pilot was an engineer dr. Hermann Vorster the Luftwaffe began serious training as soon as Hitler came to power the pupils were hand-picked and learned to fly the Messerschmitt a professionals aircraft there were no weakened Biggles here it was not until July 1938 that 19 squadron converted from gauntlet biplanes to become the first RAF Spitfire squadron the co squadron leader I lift cousins the squadron morale wasn't exactly high because after all the gum tape wasn't fast enough to run away from the Messerschmitt and so after a certain amount of wheeling and dealing with Fighter Command I managed to get the first allocation of the Spitfires I collected one and so on and the great point was could the average fighter fly a Spitfire without any dual because there were no deal the Spitfires so consequently we had a in indoctrination program whereby we watched somebody take off when you who knew the ropes and of course read the manual and had hints and tips and so on and gave him a pat on to that and said it's all yours one unlikely pupil was the Undersecretary of state for air captain Balfour who showed keen ministerial interest what is more having got into a flying suit he takes the machine for a spin an Undersecretary of State who can handle the fastest aircraft of the service at 300 miles an hour 19 squadron with nine others were Spitfire equipped just as war was declared in September 1939 floo floo was it as good as legend supposes eight guns were fired by a simple button on the pilots control column the reflector sight worked on a Victorian music hall illusion known as Pepper's Ghost there were four guns in each wing point 303 inch Browning's each with around 300 rounds builted and fed from boxes to enable the fighter to be quickly rearmed in battle a good ground crew could rearm and refuel a Spitfire in under eight minutes during the Battle of Britain 30 Spitfires were armed with two 20 millimeter Hispano cannon but the thin wings had to have bulged fairings to accommodate the bulky cannon magazines that's right due to the tendency of the early cannon to jab machine guns were preferred they were traditionally protected by the application of doped fabric to the gun ports by the onset of the Battle of Britain the variable pitch propellers of Spitfires and hurricanes had been fitted with a constant speed unit in the simplest terms an automatic in place of a manual control it meant that pilots could use full combat power without the danger of over revving the engines the primary flying controls were manual operated directly by the pilot though the landing flaps did operate by compressed air the radio wireless in 1940 was the tr9 an hf a.m. set which could be picked up by an all wave domestic radio people listened in straws to the new lexicon of combat scramble angels won 5 bandits Tallyho and the screams of boys trapped in blazing cockpits a preserved mark 2 built by westerns in 1940 it's undergoing a major overhaul Tony Bianchi Spitfire pilot and restorer of wartime aircraft is responsible for the overhaul morning I think these camshafts okay but we can have to check every one just to be on the safe side well we've been lucky with even the 1940 Spitfire which could do about 350 miles per hour was a simple machine it had no electronics the instruments are operated by vacuum or pressure the fuselage a hollow alloy tube were these formidable fighters well engineered generally they're well made airplanes you you find a few things on them which aren't very nice but you you can't really tell whether they're that's in manufacture or the work of a repair station the real heart of the airplane is the Merlin engine which was fitted in the hurricane and the Mustang and and it's got more than adequate power largely due to its excellent super charging and the ideal thing is to have a properly supercharged engine with a carburetor which is exactly what this is and it it started off at what a thousand horsepower and eventually doubled in power but what was the Spitfire like from the pilots point of view Squadron Leader Paul day a jet fighter pilot who also flies the Spitfires of the re Epps Memorial Flight assesses a 1940 mark one which actually fought in the Battle of Britain okay lovely things which are possibly undesirable as a design feature because of the left hand positioning of the throttle quadrant where it needs to be it means the undercarriage controls are on the right and consequently immediately after takeoff one changes hands so that's a little undesirable flaps which are here and reasonably well positioned for operation have no function in terms of performance flap like a Messerschmitt slats they are simply either down or up and for most of the time on a spit father would be up so they offer you nothing other than full drag for landing of the rest of it it's not badly positioned in terms of instrumentation except that the engine instruments which are clustered over on the right hand side I'm not particularly attention-getting in terms of you having a problem during a period of high workload I think the first thing you would know is oil on the windscreen or smoke because of the addition of the armored glass and the columns here it very much restricts a vision forward there would be a reflective gunsight here which are restricted even further these panels are not particularly good quality of the glass here is actually extremely poor and distortive and therefore will cut down the range of which you're going to see somebody that having been said there are also problems now in that it is very difficult to turn one's head around and look backwards which one needs to do because it's where the problem will arise most of the time for that we have Tony little makeup mirror here so you're scanning a very small fixed piece of sky out front there's a good six eight feet of nose 10 feet of nose if you talk in Griffin Spitfire under which all manner of nastiness can be going on for instance even nowadays low-level in in a Griffin Spitfire at five hundred feet three Marr the next three miles is blind to you under the nose we then come to what can you see actually out of the cockpit and of course what you can see is mainly this wonderful elliptical wing under which all manner of the problems are going to be hiding so all in all the wing is wonderful but the wing is very very much in the way in terms of what you'd expect of certainly a modern combat airplane there's far too much nose and because you're constrained in the cockpit actually seeing behind you where the trouble normally comes from is somewhat of a labor of love it's light and agile and it is given the lineage of other World War two fighters well up in its class it has the clear benefit that it's got an excellent CSU my variable pitch propeller throttle quadrants where he wants where you want it to be the actual system for arming and firing the whole thing was where you want it to be an extremely simple not unlike some modern fighters given the small cockpit you can in fact get an awful lot of back stick with quite a reasonable amount of aileron so all in all yes as a as a dogfight aeroplane of that era it's pretty good so as it turned out Reginald Mitchell got it more or less right I think Mitchell got it absolutely right yes indeed he was the quantum jump in fighter design and I think had we not had it we could have been in big trouble [Music] me-109 gee the Gustav captured after the Battle of El Alamein in 1942 stored for many years nearing end of 16 year rebuild to be the only air were the original wartime 109 of 33,000 belt Paul de Spitfire pilot and Spitfire critic climbs into a measure Schmitt for the first time well good grief the overall impression is actually much discouraging the canopy the whole design in the canopy seems to be based on a Kaiser's helmet or an afterthought or I really don't know what the second immediate impression is just how unbelievably small it is it is probably a good 25 percent less working room even than a Spitfire which surprises me given given that I'm lightly built and didn't have that much room in a Spitfire there is actually no room whatsoever and in fact I could do with a lot more room at shoulder height here there is quite considerable interference with the ability to move the stick left and right it affects your ability to swivel around even without the canopy shut alright well let's see what it's like with a lid down well well this certainly isn't for the squeamish Li claustrophobic even with no helmet and with a relatively low seat cushion and is already against the top of the canopy so-called canopy fairly obviously the first thing that takes you is just how little room it is probably it's a good a hundred percent worse than the problem of turning around to look behind you in a Spitfire the view forward well it's almost all either crops of s and not two inches of armored glass it's impossible to fly this airplane with a canopy open which fence for the provision of the sliding side windows which is fine however as it has no side door either then the consequences of crash-landing coming to rest upside down are fatal undoubtedly okay weightlifting on what is actually a very heavy canopy which I wouldn't care to have drop on my head or wrestle with in a bay light situation and take a look at what to be fair to the airplane or some features in the cockpit which I actually like starting on the left the elevator trim wheel is perhaps a bit too big but nicely positioned and businesslike full quadrant is nice fertile friction is nice it's all businesslike well to hand and of course that allows sufficient space for what is perhaps the best comparative feature cockpit wise between the 109 and spit in that the undercarriage controls are nicely to hand just in front of the throttle controls and do not require that one changes hands immediately after takeoff point flying panel given that it's not particularly familiar to me looks okay and I particularly like the artificial horizon one can cage it and thereby keep it from in toppling during heavy maneuver or possibly even faster ected afterwards it's a much more businesslike instrument than the Spitfires there is then of course the breech of the cannon which fires through the spinner which seems to take up quite inordinate amounts of room the engine gauges and fuel gates quite reasonably easy to read but other than that it's I must return to my previous verdict on it it is unbelievably small unbelievably cramped and I certainly wouldn't care to go to war in it given the knowledge that the opposition was equipped with a Spitfire I think it's terrible the Gustav of 1942 was the most numerous variant of the Messerschmitt 109s built during the war years it was as has been said produced in a third of the manner as a Spitfire five required yet it was more technically advanced for example its Dame the Benz engine was fuel-injected and the airframe seems well engineered Tony Bianchi yeah I must say it's quite an eye-opener to me I've always been led to believe that the 109 wasn't very well made and all sorts of complications on it but on first appraisal its it's certainly superb fuselage for instances it's got very nicely letting skins onto a frame and there there let in very carefully and it's nicely flush riveted it's a second generation monocoque aircraft and it's certainly more modelling in areas the skinning on the Spitfire is is rather old-fashioned in various areas and it's quite complex as well this is a lot more simple there's no double curved skins at all on the fuselage anywhere it's all really quite easily done in the field for repair and I'm sure and manufacturer is very simple and easy I was always under the impression they were harried in some areas okay there's some skins which having particularly nicely put on but it's it doesn't detract away from its general quality there's some beautiful engineering in it and some excellent quality workmanship as well all the sort of general servicing such as removing sparking plugs is very much easier than for instance with the Merlin cutting the lead ends on is difficult but with this it's very easily accessible the cowlings are very easy to undo there you don't have the same problem as with a spit for instance lots of cowling classes that you usually shaken to pieces are worn out with this it's three fasteners and you undo the cowling you can get at the oil cooler easily wonderfully accessible the Spitfire in its own ways it's a completely different sort of aircraft this I think you'd have to be attuned to it and be used to continental airplanes to feel the benefit I must say the Merlin looks old-fashioned this engine certainly looks like looking at a German Grand Prix car of the pre-war period and it's at the moment it's beautifully clean and it's very much an engineering job probably over engineered for its needs at the time however the me-109 s were not easy aircraft to fly indeed one Luftwaffe test fighter described the landing characteristics of the Gustav as malicious over 1,500 student pilots were killed in flying accidents in 109 s in the first two years of the war no wonder congratulations were in order following a successful students landing but why would the me-109 so difficult bus come down test pilot reg Hammond part of the problem is the geometry of this undercarriage you can see how the the legs are splayed out like that and if you do get the airplane going sideways on takeoff and landing the leg wants to dig in and cause the swing to increase when also there's two or three degrees of towing on the wheels and if you do get up on one wheel the airplane wants to sort of bicycle around like that so it's very important to keep the nose of the airplane pointing in the right direction on takeoff and landing and to be able to do that of course you've got to see so you need to be able to see out to the front well and that's just what you don't have in this airplane so you've got to work particularly hard and looking left and right on takeoff the landing to keep your directional control an interesting feature is this leading edge slats you should be able to push it in with one finger they operate automatically when you're pulling the airplane hard in manoeuvre or slip flying it slowly and what happens is they pop out like that and then high-energy air goes through this slot and over the upper surface of the wing and you get extra lift that way they're very gentle and benign in operation they work very smoothly and even if they operate a symmetrically one before the other you don't get there's nasty snatch rolls that you can get on some airplanes that have this design feature they're very very smooth handling devices motor 1942 the island is under siege and the early defenders a few war weary hurricanes which are totally outclassed spitfyre fives were flown from carriers and water became a repeat of the Battle of Britain this unique gun camera film shows a Spitfire five port / mortar out turning its German opponent under relentless fire to emerge unscathed spitfires had turned the air battle the siege was lifted and soon Spitfires flew from mortar to support the Eighth Army as bombers an RAF Spitfire pilots who fought the measurements over mortar na'vi Lucas we always had a very high regard for them 109f sand jeez as we had there in 1942 and the Luftwaffe flew them awfully well they got them most they could out of these aeroplanes they flew him very fast with these open line abreast four pairs of aircraft and fours and they were really very good indeed but I don't know that any of our fellows were they preferred distress but far five which is what we have there and of course later on about the Spitfire nine which was a wonderful aeroplane but on the whole the thing as you know very well went from one our plane to another one side got the ascendant and then the other passed to the other and so on and this aircraft which lasted throughout the war was an exceptionally good airplane I know there's any question of it well I've never found a Spitfire pilot yet who wasn't prepared to take on a mission that 109f 4G in his Spitfire five but the problem came in I can remember it so well at the end of 1941 early part of 1942 suddenly there's what wolf 190s appeared and that was a different couple of fish I mean we had three or so terrible months with the fives against the focke-wulf 190s because they were definitely superior I mean up to about twenty-two or twenty-three thousand feet they really were and it was a very very rough time indeed the focke-wulf 190 the butcherbird as it was called was indeed formidable its 1,700 horsepower BMW radial engine gave it a speed of over 400 miles per hour it was agile very well-armed and completely outclassed the 365 mile per hour speed far 5 it was considered a most serious threat to the RAF whose hard-won air superiority was suddenly cast into doubt [Music] but then with the genius of super Marines and rolls-royce they introduced this fit Vaughn nine with the Merlin 61 series of 61 and the 66 engine with a two-speed two-stage blood which came in at all as I remember at 14,000 and then of 23 or 24,000 feet really put some G behind it and the thing was I mean that of course the focke-wulf 190 finance who'd had a field day with us in the files with the Merlin fortifies they saw these our crafter these but fine lines they didn't know there were nines of dollars what they were Pfizer thought they're gonna have another fielder and then Johnny Johnson and all these fellows were these Canadians and the nines there as if they took the pants off him and they never knew what hit him the Spitfire nine was the first major variant to exceed 400 miles per hour the speed of the S six bees of 1931 Spitfire production at Castle Bromwich peaks at 320 a month we absolutely depended on the Americans for our whole rearmament program and the Spitfire included we depended on them for the advanced machine tools of fabricated the engines and the airframes we depended on them for the browning machine guns we actually depended on them enormously for instruments and instrument panels because in a word the floral Brits at that time had a rather weak high technology and industry in terms of the machine tools instruments you just had to be imported of course we did by there's magnificent Pratt & Whitney jig borås and so on which were the best in the world the Germans Bolton - and so did the French so that the the Americans were producing their seams but we delivered a lot of things the other way nobody had a monopoly of the best ideas before the war or ium during the war and we were well of course the the Americans didn't have a fighter worth anything until the Mustang came along with the Merlin engine to a British specification so we it was a two way road one of the problems of British industry during the war was that it was even then the devil buy go slows and unofficial strikes and therefore aircraft production you tended to suffer quite a bit not much as it appears in terms of the overall numbers but just enough disruption to cause quite over alarm to the government at the time they had some unrest but nothing serious there were no major strikes now they were just really getting into the ideas of what mass production or what for those days was mass production was all about and of course the were a few problems to an out but they weren't held up and the fact that more spit for twice as many Spitfires and hurricanes together were built during the Battle of Britain that the compared with the Germans output of Messerschmitts shows that it wasn't too bad an effort anyway a Spitfires were built under pressures of war what problems did they pose on their first flight chief test pilot Anakin Shaw we had plenty of aircraft that gave trouble but that's what our job was for was to find out what the trouble was to to locate it and and put it right I should think very little trouble with the fuser languages such possibly some troubles with the engine a time like school gear failure you could fly the aircraft on test probably three four times perfectly okay and then abnormal revs normal boost the engine was suddenly stopped because the two Magneto's being cut off but I think possibly apart from the skew gears piston failure was probably the most disconcerting depending on when the engine suffered its damage I did have one in a dive that the piston seized the whole engine seized and then because we were in the die with the prop thrust Loney overloading the bearers the engine and the cowlings were starting to break up and fly around and before I knew where I was I'd been flung out also [Music] Spitfires flew in every theater throughout the war long-range versions flew photographic reconnaissance to record post raid bomb damage and to locate targets for fighter sweeps over northern France with hundreds of Spitfires attacking targets of opportunity as a prelude to invasion see fires flew from carriers on every ocean including the Pacific there were of course pretenders to the throne the North American Mustang the early versions however were confined by the poor altitude performance of their American Allison engines to a low level ground attack role but later versions with rolls-royce Merlin's became excellent long-range escort fighters Hawker tempest s-- with their complex 24/7 dan napier sabre engines were used against the first jets the v1 flying bombs as were Spitfires 350 V ones were shot down by fighters though attacking a v1 was never popular as the Allied armies advanced Spitfires operated from makeshift forward air streams these are flying with the 12th US air force in North Africa some of the 350 Spitfires given to the United States as the war ended Spitfires flew in celebration they had served with distinction from the first day of the war to the last I mean you asked me what was the best fighter aircraft for the purposes that we used it for the spitball without stem they would linger on to the jet age well into the 50s the last on meteorological flights their day is done so three spits will be kept by the RAF for Battle of Britain flight paths commemorating the battle they did so much to win the rest were scrapped or like that first Spitfire used for target practice but no more any Spitfire is now pure gold at a secret workshop in Hampshire not far from where the first were built there is more than nos towns yet to be found [Music] in these workshops skilled men are building and rebuilding by hand Spitfires for customers across the world there's a long waiting list then they cost a good deal more than the wartime price of around 6,000 pounds strangely the name Spitfire was disliked by Mitchell bloody silly he called it an alternative seriously considered was shrew turtles and shrews true fund a squadron of shrews we could have lost the war [Music] [Laughter] [Music] the merits and deep
