It was airborne for just eight minutes – but those eight minutes changed the course of World War II. With the chief test pilot of the Vickers aviation company, Captain Joseph ‘Mutt’ Summers, at the controls, the Supermarine Spitfire prototype K5054 – fitted with a fine-pitch propeller for additional take-off power – soared into the skies over Southampton’s Eastleigh Aerodrome for its maiden test flight. The aircraft’s baptism came just four months after the equivalent flight of the Hawker Hurricane. Together, the two single-seat fighters would play a decisive role in the Battle of Britain, and ensure Winston Churchill’s boast that the UK would ‘never surrender’ had bite as well as bombast.
The Spitfire’s maiden flight took place on 5 March 1936 – 90 years ago this spring – with production beginning two years later. Famously, the man responsible was the aircraft designer Reginald Joseph (R J) Mitchell (see box below), a trained engineer who had joined Supermarine in 1916. As the aviation company’s chief designer, he churned out seaplanes for the international Schneider Trophy races, which took place annually, and in the 1930s conceived his masterpiece, the iconic Spitfire, whose ultimate triumph he sadly would not live to see.
R J MITCHELL (1895-1937)
War Classics – Flashman