32 minutes ago, Will Fly For Cheese said:

In addition to being a handful Alex Henshaw - Production Test Pilot at Castle Bromwich personally flew 2,360 spits (1 in 10 of total number produced) to test them straight off the production line and later said that no two were alike.

That was certainly true for the very first ones from Supermarine, and not in a good way either. Supermarine was, as its name suggests, geared toward making seaplanes and so it was based at Woolston in Southampton. They were always innovative, but they typically built small orders of flying boats, and of course the one-off S-series Schneider Cup racing seaplanes which got them considerable funding from the Government and private backers and led to them considering making a fighter aeroplane in the first place.

What that meant in practice however, was that their designs often required a lot of hand-finishing and skilled craftsmanship, which is fine when you're making a one-off competition racing seaplane, but it's a problem if you're having to churn out orders for 500 fighters plus all the spares for them as well.

As lovely-looking as the Spitfire's elliptical wing is, contrary to popular belief was not RJ Mitchell's brilliant original idea. He had visited the Heinkel works in the early 1930s, saw them making the He-111 when Germany was sneakily pretending it was an airliner design, and Mitchell thought, hmm, that's nice looking, and fast, I'll have that. Mitchell knew that Heinkel's He-70 Blitz, from which the 111 was derived, had set numerous world speed records, as did the He-111 when flown as an 'airliner' in the 1930s whilst sneakily doing photo recon over the UK, but such a beautiful curved wing really confers little benefit to things aerodynamically, it just makes the thing more complicated to build. This is why Heinkel redesigned their He-111 to have a much simpler, straighter wing later in the war. We can also note that many fighter aeroplanes of note do not have such curvaceous lines as the Spitfire, including its most famous adversary - the bf109 - but they seem to perform okay.

Back with the Spitfire, you've also got the big curved walkway fairing where the wing meets the fuselage, which had to be hand-rolled on a panel press by a skilled worker when Supermarine were making the first Spits. As a result of all these complex curves, many early Spitfire parts needed a lot of 'fettling' to actually get them to fit together, and it was as a result of this necessity for faffing about during construction that the thing underwent some major production development to improve that process by Supermarine's replacement for Mitchell from 1937 onwards - Joseph Smith.

Prior to all that tweaking of the design to make it at least more production-friendly, this is why you hear the oft-repeated story that the Hurricane in the Battle of Britain was easier to repair than the Spitfire, but it might actually be more truthful to say that it was nowhere near as much of a pain in the @rse to repair as the Spitfire, rather than being easy. Later in the war you could indeed take a wing off the stores shelves and fit it onto a battle-damaged Spitfire in fairly short order, but that wasn't true of the first variants, and especially the ones made at the Supermarine works. This is not to say that they were not brilliant aeroplanes, but the early ones would all have needed slightly different rigging and slightly different trim settings, whereas the ones from 1941 onwards would have been more consistent.

Edited April 4, 20215 yr by Chock

can see you at Lee Chock

me: wazitdoinnow

Edited April 4, 20215 yr by Will Fly For Cheese

Camera settings gone weird, restarting lol

 

i have rudder issues! just getting some height

View keeps flicking around, can't fly like that. Trying to sort it out

 

roger

Bloody camera  every time I open the throttle I get the camera going mental. This is annoying!

 

Edited April 4, 20215 yr by Chock

landing. please don"t watch

Disabled my rudder pedals, one last try and then I'll be giving up lol.

word not allowed

 

got callibrate me rudders

Dunno what's going on, some kind of control assignment clash.

you in the Corsair?

nice TO

Edited April 4, 20215 yr by Will Fly For Cheese

Nope, Spit IX

bloody rudder !

Out mate. got to sort this out.

Nice flying!

Edited April 4, 20215 yr by Will Fly For Cheese