Spitfires. Lots of Spitfires.

Many more here. Whine about the source all you like, these are some great pictures!

Pictures of Spitfires without sound are pointless. I saw this last year :

A sound which always brings a lump to my throat, and which 75 years ago brought a shiver down Jerry’s spine.

[Ninjaeditasyou’vefixedit]

That sound….! Hadn’t seen that before, thanks for posting, Ernie.

Other aeroplanes look like they’re working to fly, the Spitfire always looked like it just belonged in the air. Glorious.

One flew over the village the other day when The Boy and I were out for a walk. I stopped dead in my tracks, picked him up and said, “Look. Listen. Soak this up, because this is special!”. I can only hope it somehow sinks in to his memory.

Needs moar gnarrr..

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=darwen+spitfire&prmd=isvn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRn_Cv_ebMAhUJLMAKHTNBA0UQ_AUIBygB&biw=568&bih=320&dpr=2#imgrc=lSL361kHuCWC6M%3A

Spitfire memorial in Darwen.

One flew over my house on Tuesday whilst I was cutting the grass – heard it over the lawnmower!! Also had a herc & 2 Apaches.

I love this one!

The sound of several spitfires is just amazing. Truly. Shivers

Some friends bought me a seat on a wing-to-wing flight with a Spitfire above Duxford last year:

And they did mean it when they said wing-to-wing:

The plane that I was in:

Link to the full album on Flickr.

I’ll bite!

The ‘source’ is, as usual, so badly written and researched as to be laughable by any one who has a smidgin of knowledge in this area. I have never seen any accurate pieces on aviation matters in that rag.

For a start, anyone who knows anything about John Dibbs knows the extraordinary images he has taken over the years and the ‘clout’ he has in the warbird world. Owners queue up to have him take pictures of their aircraft and to marvel about ‘hand held’ cameras…. What else is he going to use?!!

Nice pics though.

Restorations are cool and all, but wartime wrecks in the jungle are where it’s at.

Wrecked Mitsubishi Betty – Palau – this things…just sitting in the freaking jungle. Where it crashed! Conserving them is great, but I’m selfish – I want to stumble across these things how they were 70 odd years ago.

I want to go knocking around Palau at some point with the husband of my wifes friend, a GE engineer who has the same utterly bonkers fascination with vintage aircraft that I did when I was a kid.

I won’t even entertain the Daily Heil, but I know and love my Spitfires…

Mk IXs, Mk XVIs, a Mk XX, a XVIII and I’m pretty sure that’s a Mk II.

Back in 2000, I was at Duxford on a weekday having a mooch. I heard the distinctive noise while I was nosing around one of the restoration hangers, sure enough a Mk IX was trundling down the runway. What happened next was unforgettable, the 56 year old plane was given some stick as it was put through it’s paces. It’s hard to convey just how fast that Spitfire was flying, for the most part they’re treated very, very gently when you see them flying today (back in the forties, they had a projected maximum lifespan of roughly 200 flying hours before being written off and were built accordingly, today most display Spitfires will clock that in a single year). They’re a heck of a lot faster AND noisier than you’d think. It’s a good noise, the supercharger whine over the relatively small capacity V12 is intoxicating (the early Spitfires’ Merlin displaced roughly 27 litres vs the Me109s’ 42 litres). Griffon Spitfires are altogether more guttural, brutal sounding as befits a racing engine that was productionised, but they lack that sonorous Merlin noise.

Not too long ago, I got to sit in a genuine WW2 Mk IX at Biggin Hill. They’re surprisingly comfortable and roomy. They’re not the ergonomic nightmare you’d expect either, all the major controls are within a fingertips’ reach.

I found out recently that I had an uncle who flew them during WW2…

What a thread !

Its just the most wonderful aircraft which makes the most evocative sound. When they recently started doing the “punter” flights I looked them up straight away, sadly a very special occasion thing (£8k-£12k I recall). I heard a lottery winner say it would the first he would do with the money.

Sad I missed the Goodwood special a few years ago, as a spotty teenager in the mid 70’s I went to a Spitfire symposium with Douglas Bader and Bob Stamford-Tuck and still remember it to this day. The BoB flght usually do a display at the Dartmouth Regatta and I saw the flypast at Buckingham Palace last year.

@PJM fascinating .. one day a ride and a beer with you just to hear more

I’m going to cause an upset here aren’t I.

I prefer the whistle and purr of a BF109 F/G.

😈

No contest.

@Tom_W1987

I do sort of see what you mean…

They’re not the ergonomic nightmare you’d expect either, all the major controls are within a fingertips’ reach.

It’s almost as if RJ Mitchell knew what he was doing ! 😉

Got to watch a mock dog fight between a spitfire and a me109 at Duxford on the day Le Tour came through.

Except the controls weren’t that well harmonised….

*grumbles something about the bf109*

😀

I’ll get my coat.

I’m lucky enough to work for a company that has a company Spitfire. As a result, every so often we get a fly-by. Sometimes they’re completely unannounced, but you know.
The rumble starts about five seconds before the plane arrives. Then you know it’s arrived.

You see people scrabbling to get to a window or outside. Incredible things.

“In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy.

The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that?

There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops”

– Luftwaffe Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, January 1943

I’m lucky enough to work for a company that has a company Spitfire.

Now thats a great use of shareholders money 🙂

@ernie I believe the Mosquito was one of the first effective night fighters ?

Why are the tail tips different? Is it simply different generations/mk’s?

Jerry never stood a chance…….what were they thinking?!!

They had nice uniforms mind

Lovely thing, effective, at pretty much everything

I seem to remember Goring was even more hacked of about its precision bombing and Photo-recon roles. He even tried to copy it

Focke-Wulf_Ta_154

They had nice uniforms mind

All their kit was pretty good, my father said the leather jerkin he liberated made life much better.

mitsumonkey

Re the tail, by the end of production Spitfires were a proper

Triggers broom,

but UK preferred incremental change of existing designs, which is why Whittle was ignored

You can thank Hugo Boss for the uniforms

1.52 onwards does it for me

No contest.

Nah, P51 with the gun covers removed…that’s a noise

*grumbles something about the bf109*

The very early ones were bf but in reality all wartime 109’s were known as ME109, despite the fact that they were officially bf… Messersshcmitt “acquired” the company in 1938.

Why are the tail tips different?

As the engines (espicially the griffon engined versions) got more powerful the rudder and rear horizontal planes needed to be bigger to counteract the turning forces, and handily on the mk16 it also moved the CoG forward a bit, that reduced control flutter, and again the slight loses of control that the cut down rear spine removed…Just tweaks really

I was sat last year or so having lunch, window open.
Having spent some of childhood with grandad at end of Waddington runway, and living under Scampton flight path, it took approximately half a second for my brain to register *that* noise.

Transpires it was the day the Forth Bridge (and Stirling Castle, and Ochils) had a flyby to celebrate 125 years…

How do I get me one of these?

And a Lancaster is a better sound. 3 MOAR engine than a Spitfire. 😉

And a Lancaster is a better sound. 3 MOAR engine than a Spitfire.

One did a flypast a couple of years ago, only imagine how bloodcurdling the noise of 100’s of them would be if you lived in Dresden.

I’m lucky enough to work for a company that has a company Spitfire.

Now thats a great use of shareholders money

I’m told when said company liquidated a few years back and went into state ownership the spitfire was hidden (physically and off the books) so it couldn’t be sold off. No idea whether that’s true or not, but I’d like to think so.

+1 with Pook on the flybys. Always makes you smile when you get an impromptu spitfire air show during the working day.

My grandfather flew Spitfires during the war out of Leuchars. He was shot down over Norway in 1942 by a FW190 whilst hunting for the Scharnhorst. He was an incredible man with some amazing stories about flying and surviving as POW. Here he is just before departing Leuchars on a mission:

And here he is returning in 2010 where he met with the Battle of Britain memorial flight crew and happily chatted about Spitfires all day:

He was a real life war hero (not that he’d ever want to be described as such!) and a true gentleman. I’ve got a piece of the fuselage from his downed spit (some Norwegian divers found it in the late 60’s at the bottom of a fjord) which is one of my most prized possessions.

The very early ones were bf but in reality all wartime 109’s were known as ME109, despite the fact that they were officially bf… Messersshcmitt “acquired” the company in 1938.

Only aircraft designed after BFW took on the Messersshcmitt name were named with the prefix “ME”, eg the ME262.

The BF109 continued to be prefixed with “BF” throughout the war, although the prefix “ME” was used interchangeably – mainly by the allies but often at all levels within the Luftwaffe and also the company itself.

Basically BFW couldn’t work out how they wanted to market the thing.

so, you agree with me…? 😕 weird post.

The only “real” ME109 were K from about -4 onwards if memory serves…but damn near everyone called them Me109…we did, they did, (Galland does all the way through his books for instance)

[/url]IMG_6075 by toppers3933[/url], on Flickr[/img]

Here we go.

@NickC

Sorry, I took that as a bit of irritating pedantry and upped it a bit – thinking that you were insinuating that “BF” was incorrect. It wasn’t, some squadrons called it the ME109, others called it the BF109.

Bf109 is the type designation used on practically all 109 serial plates.

Here is a squadron loss report.

Then, from the exact same unit.

And to be REAAALLLY pedantic, Messer did not acquire BFW – it was the other way round.

It was the bicycles that brought me here, but the pedantry and downright nerdism keeps me coming back.