"It's timeless, it is the most perfect piece of engineering - a work of art."
True, except it was hardly perfect engineering. If you nosed it hard into a dive, the carburetors would spill fuel into the cockpit. Pilots learned to roll it on its back and pull it down that way. The Me109 was fuel injected and didn't have that problem. The 109 also took half as many hours to produce.
All WW2 airplanes had their various problems that would kill the unwary pilot. The good pilots would avoid the defects in their airplane and play to the defects in the enemy machine.
Pilots learned to roll it on its back and pull it down that way
Any fighter performs better under positive G's than negative G's. So of course pilots try to pull positive G's when they can. Good tactics at 10,000 feet.
But here's a twist: I have read that aggressive A-10 Warthog pilots will do this a few hundred feet off the ground. I.e. before they crest a ridge they invert, so they can duck back under the ridge line more quickly.
That's what Tom Wolfe would call "the right stuff".
Hum, that's the first time I have heard that explanation. What I've heard was that negative G caused the carburetor to flood, yes, but the result was the engine stalling, not fuel spilling into the cockpit. Which IMHO sounds more plausible..
Perhaps you're thinking of the typhoon & tempest which had a problem of exhaust leaking into the cockpit. Solution: pilot wad required to always use the oxygen mask.
I read about this problem in one of many accounts on flying Spits in combat. Yes, it was the gas, not an exhaust leak. Sorry I don't have a cite.
The Merlin engine had other issues - it was very sensitive to battle damage. This is in contrast to the engine on the P47, which could take a lot of damage and keep running.
Bug or intentional design tradeoff? When you choose an inline V12 over a radial engine, you're implicitly choosing to be more sensitive to battle damage.
But the R-2800 Double Wasp is an engineering triumph in its own right. Hellcat, Corsair, Thunderbolt, Black Widow, Bearcat... they put it in everything.
"Bug or intentional design tradeoff? When you choose an inline V12 over a radial engine, you're implicitly choosing to be more sensitive to battle damage."
@Agathos you have to remember history to understand why the RAF selected this design.
The conflicting design problems at the time (mid 1930's) dictating power plant choice? How do we create a fighter with enough power and speed that will allow bombers & fighters to be shot down using the limited resources we have (dollars, manpower and materials) post, "great depression"?
The answer, the Rolls Royce V12, inline Merlin. It did the job. Especially in '39 and 1940, when the only thing separating a full out invasion by Nazi Germany was 22 miles of water and the sky.
Radial engines did their own cooling, didn't they? Coolant loss would cause any in-line engine to seize up, Merlin, Allison, or whatever it was that the ME-109 used.
It wasn't just the coolant. My dad, who flew both P-51s and P-47s, had an incident in each where the engine swallowed a valve. The P-51 immediately lost power, and clearly wasn't going to keep running for more than a few minutes, and required an immediate emergency landing. The P-47 kept producing power as if nothing had happened, and enabled my father to bring it home.
loved this story @WalterBright and not the first time I've heard a description of a Bolt returning home, shot to bits but functionally intact. Pity the pilots who had trouble with a '51 with a full tank of fuel at take-off.
A great article to read, "Chuck Hawks" and "Rip Collins" (who flew both) comparison of 47 and 51. ~ http://www.chuckhawks.com/p47.htm
Little known fact: when Williams, Kilburn and Tootill were building the SSEM (nicknamed the Baby) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scale_Experim... - the World's first stored program computer, some of the parts they used such as switches and so on were the same as those used by the Spitfire builders because there was plenty of them around spare in wartime Britain.
When the reconstruction was being built, the restorers had to track down parts from Spitfires that were no longer airworthy to be as authentic as possible.
Source: I know somebody who spent a lot of time talking to somebody involved in the restoration.
I really like learning about all the counter measures and the like that went into these planes. I'm curious about a caption from one of the pictures though.
The yellow diamond of reactive paint on the wing was supposed to give early warning of a gas attack by turning black.
Do they mean gas attack like, mustard gas attack or my wing is shot up and leaking fuel?
Is it just me, or does $4 million seem quite "reasonable" for something this rare and with this much work invested? Yes, it's a large sum of money, but given the choice between a vintage race car or the Spitfire, I'd take the warbird every time (and I'm not a pilot).
The cheapest fighter jet you can get is the L-39 Albatross from the 1960's which will run you between $200k-1mil depending on work required for flight worthiness while on the higher end a supersonic trainer like the F5 would run at least $2mil.
Considering how rare the parts are and the difficulty of finding someone qualified to actually do the work, $4mil is certainly very reasonable, especially if the Spitfire is actually flight worthy.
B - There are plenty still flying. There used to be a lot more actually, as they were sold off the public quite cheaply after the war. Many many have been lost to accidents over the years - The P-51 is NOT a forgiving airplane.
C - The biggest challenge - Really the ONLY major challenge, airframe/structural work is basically a solved problem - are the engines. The Rolls Royce Merlin engine, used in both the Spitfire and the P-51, was last manufactured in 1950. While there were many built (and thus many to scavenge from), that inventory is only shrinking as engines are replaced or overhauled. Basically the world's entire stock of Merlin parts lives in a group of semi trailers in the California desert (http://www.51-factory.com/merlin_overhaul.html) - when they're gone, they're gone.
I find it hard to believe that there are Merlin engine parts that cannot be made from scratch. Even engine blocks - if the drag racing industry can make custom engine blocks from scratch, why can't a V12 be made?
Every part _can_ be made, and eventually, likely, every part will be made in order to keep these things operational, but enthusiasts find these machines more authentic if they are made from authentic parts.
If one starts building new parts from scratch there may come a moment where people say something has become a replica, more so if one also uses new technology (philosophers discuss this as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus).
The weird thing, though, is that the road along which one gets to an object is more important than the end result in determining authenticity. Replace all parts of a spitfire until just one piece remains original, and you have an original spitfire. Build a replica, buy that one original part, and include it, and you still have a replica.
A nice example is HMS Victory, a wooden warship that saw battle at Trafalgar. It is kept afloat by replacing its parts. By now around 20% of the original wood remains (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/05/world/europe/hms-victory/). Yet, we think of it as the original ship.
However, it is not a given that replacing all parts makes a new object. The Ise grand shrine in Japan is over 2000 years old, but gets rebuilt with new materials every 20 years (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine)
I understand the desire for "authentic" parts, but one is chasing rainbows. I recall once a business was selling "authentic" 1960s air in a can one could use to fill the tires on one's authentic 1960s muscle car.
My personal opinion is that wrecks dredged up from swamps and such should be put into museums as is. Flying airplanes should be replicas, made as close to the original specifications as the owner wants.
For example, a few years ago there was a project at Paine Field to build flying replicas of the Me262. They took apart an original to measure everything and make a specification. As a concession to safety, they used modern jet engines and instrumentation, and used lead weights instead of guns (to maintain proper balance).
I would have bought one if I could afford one!
Nobody would actually want to fly an original, because the engines only lasted about 20 hours, were extremely unreliable, and nobody bothered with corrosion protection (didn't expect the machine to last long enough to corrode).
As an analogy, due to cell replication and replacement I'm probably 0% my original "self" but I'm obviously the original me. If you cloned me, and gave my clone my arm, that'd obviously be the replica anyways. So it seems to make sense to me.
Downvoted? I expected that. Nobody likes truth. BBC for taxpayers money advertises Christies's auction and raises public awareness in UK military. Two nice rabbits with a single shot.
@nbevans. I personally like Spitfire very much. But nothing is published on BBC without dual or triple purpose these days.
True, except it was hardly perfect engineering. If you nosed it hard into a dive, the carburetors would spill fuel into the cockpit. Pilots learned to roll it on its back and pull it down that way. The Me109 was fuel injected and didn't have that problem. The 109 also took half as many hours to produce.
All WW2 airplanes had their various problems that would kill the unwary pilot. The good pilots would avoid the defects in their airplane and play to the defects in the enemy machine.