Here's some stuff you don't see every day. This is some recovered wreckage from Spitfire R6753.

This Spitfire was a genuine Supermarine-built model made at the Woolston factory in June 1940. On July 14th she was issued to 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron based at RAF Turnhouse in Scotland where she was painted with the Squadron code XT-G. 603 squadron initially fought against Ju88s and Heinkel He111s coming across the North Sea to bomb targets in Scotland, but as the Battle of Britain heated up, they moved south on August 27th, to RAF Hornchurch which was a base for front-line fighters during the Battle of Britain.

You can see the force of the impact from this wreckage. This is part of the battery casing:

This is part of the Supercharger casing from its Merlin 3:

This is an airframe fastening:

This is part of the paneling, which shows you how thin the Duralumin skin of the Spitfire was. It still has the green paint on it and there is a small trace of the brown colour or its camouflage too on this section:

You can see from how finely made these parts are, why the British had to streamline production at the new Castle Bromwich factory built specifically to make the Spitfire. Supermarine was far more used to making small orders of aircraft and their craftsmen hand-made a lot of parts. The Castle Bromwich factory automated much of this process by drawing off the knowledge of various car manufacturers in the UK, such as using pantograph extensions on lathes to allow numerous parts to be milled at the same time. As a result of this, later Spitfires were more easily able to swap parts to repair battle damage, whereas the first ones made by Supermarine often had panels which were hand-finished, making it difficult to swap parts over.

This is a wingtip navigation light for a Spitfire. This is not from R6753, it is unused stock from WW2:

Here is the box it is in. You can see from the stamp it was made in Canada and shipped over to the UK in 1942:

Back with R6753, on August 29th, she was being flown by Colin Pinckney after they had been scrambled to intercept a raid coming over the Channel at the height of the battle. Pinckney is pictured below:

The Spitfires of 603 clashed with what Douglas Bader frequently called: 'yellow-nosed b*st*rds', aka Messerschmitt bf 109Es of Luftwaffe Squadrons based in the Abbeville area of France, including JG.26. Pinckney had just shot down a bf109E in the engagement on August 29th, when moments later R7653 was damaged by fire from another Messerschmitt bf109E, piloted by Herman Freidrich Joppiens. Joppiens may possibly have downed Richard Hillary's Spitfire too. Joppiens is pictured below.

Pinckney was slightly burned in the incident and bailed out. R6753 crashed at 06:42 near St Mary’s Road, Dymchurch in Kent. Burning furiously and with its engine still at full power, R6753 had drilled into the ground at high speed with only some small parts remaining on the surface. She was completely smashed to pieces. The wreckage stayed buried unto the 1980s, when it was excavated; the British were far too busy fighting the Germans to spend much time on recovering wreckage at the time of the crash.

Pinckney was friends with Richard Hillary who was in 603 Squadron too. Hillary was also shot down that same day in the same engagement, but Hillary was very badly burned. As his fuel tank erupted in flames he struggled to open the canopy as the flames bursting through the panel scorched at him, he only just managed to bail out over the English channel. He landed in the water and thought he would drown, but his Mae West lifejacket had fortunately not burned and kept him afloat until he was fished out by the Margate lifeboat. Hillary is pictured here, before he was burned in his combat engagement:

It's quite remarkable that Hillary's lifevest did not burn, as pilots at the time were issued white ones which many pilots chose to paint with yellow aircraft trainer dope in order to make them more visible if they came down in the Channel, little realising that this made them incredibly flammable and of course added to the terrible burns many pilots received, a sad situation which did however lead to Sir Archibald McIndoe pioneering plastic reconstruction surgery. 

If you watch the 1969 movie The Battle of Britain, there is a scene with the character Squadron Leader Colin Harvey, played by Christopher Plummer which recalls this terrible and scary aspect of WW2 fighter combat, with some brutal realism. Plummer's character, who ends up bailing out but is badly burned, is a composite character based in part on  Richard Hillary and also Colin Pinckney as is obvious from the character's name. Hillary's injuries are foreshadowed in the movie, when Plummer's fiancee (played by Susannah York), is greeted by a pilot in the Operations Room who is badly burned and scarred.

This character is played by Bill Foxley, who genuinely did have terrible burn scars which he received when as a Navigator on a Bomber in WW2, his aeroplane crashed and burned. Foxley was one of the RAF aircrew who was treated by McIndoe's pioneering surgery. Shortly after the scene in which she meets the pilot who, in the movie has had to bail out of a burning Hurricane and depicted by Foxley with remarkable dignity, we get this scene:

Whilst Hillary was recovering, he wrote his famous autobiography The Last Enemy, in which he details this engagement and how he met Pinckney in the same hospital they had both been taken to. Less badly wounded, Pinckney returned to action quickly and he is fairly unique in being one of the few Allied pilots to have defeated aeroplanes from all three Axis forces, German, Italian and Japanese, becoming an Ace as a result of his harsh lessons learned in the Battle of Britain.

Sadly, as was the case for many in WW2, all three of the men in this particular battle did not survive the war. Hillary crashed in a Bristol Blenheim whilst on a night training exercise after he'd returned to duties (perhaps when he should not have since he was still very badly wounded). Pinckney was shot down in the Pacific Theatre battling the Japanese, and Joppiens was downed by a Russian MiG-3 on the Eastern front.

 

Edited March 8, 20215 yr by Chock

Little question guys. Is engine damage not modelled at all? I ran the engine at max boost for 15 minutes or so and nothing happened. I'm used to DCS and IL2 where the engines are more fragile. Is it essentially indestructible and I can fly around everywhere at full power, or am I missing something?

 

I know I sound a bit nit picky, but part of the reason I like these old birds is I find it fun to take care of their high performance engines.

Also @Chock thanks for the book recommendation. I'll pick that up!

I have Pete Brothers too! My home built Hurricane cockpit for Cliffs of Dover was based on Peters 32 Sqn GZ-L. 

Pete Brothers & Robert Stanford-Tuck in background. I was taking a pic of my nearly completed Hurricane Mk II BFP. 

 

After airshow in Las Vegas back to Chino, CA

Looks so real!

Wow, yeah, especially looking at it on my iPad I had to zoom in to confirm it was a screenshot, very nice!

I am learning how to land the Spitfire in slight x-wind about 45º at 15kts.

Here are a few shots of how the landing went including cockpit views of the pedals and stick. You have to be on your toes.

What a fun plane. Absolutely my favorite payware for FS2020 so far.

I have always loved the Spitfire, I have flown 3 different RC versions of it and crashed 2 of them badly. I also built several plastic models of Spitfires growing up in Scotland, in the 60's.

So here is a video of my latest adventure with the Spitfire. Replays from FSplayground, really works well.

 

Edited March 9, 20215 yr by 177B

Jan has jumped on this. Two nice repaints over on flightsim.to already.

I might be overlooking something, but has anyone gotten the P8 (or is it P11?) in this to function?   I've used this type of compass in old warbirds before, so I know how they're supposed to work, but I can't seem to get this one working right.  When I line up North on the compass ring with the cross on the card my reported heading is nowhere near what it actually is.

Didn't think to take any screenshots when I was messing with it tonight, unfortunately.   Hopefully I'm just missing something on this model.

Also, @Chock, your knowledge and stories are one of my favorite things in any thread here about warbirds.

@Chock That was an awesome post. 

@Chock Fantastic video review and some truly great posts in here! I particularly enjoyed your explanation of the famous Merlin Engine sound and how it's influenced by the Doppler effect - really hit the nail on the head there.

Some truly fantastic screenshots in this thread too from everyone! Superb

Dan

@Dan_FIS One thing you could maybe bring up with Asobo is the addition of a brake axis in the control settings. Right now they have a right brake and left brake axis which allows us to apply a small amount of brake when using e.g. rudder pedal toe brakes. There's no axis as far as I can see for applying both brakes together. If there was this would allow us to better simulate the brakes in the Spitfire e.g. on my stick I have a lever slider which would allow me to apply a small amount of brake if this dual brake axis was available. But right now using this lever results in a push button behaviour where the brakes are either fully applied or not at all. In DCS however I can use this lever on my stick to fine control the brakes as they have an axis for both brakes together.

Edited March 9, 20215 yr by Tektolnes
Fixed post

Thanks, Alan & SD, for making me spend more money than I wanted to this month. 😀