Spitfires are so distracting!

[t8hants]

All this week at regular intervals a Spitfire has flown across the Island, several times a day, occasionally obliging with a few aerobatics. This afternoon on site, I was able to enjoy him doing a loop or two as well as the usual turns and rolls almost directly overhead. Yesterday we had a pair stooging about in close formation, I think they are doing the very expensive pleasure flights in the twin-seater. The slightest hint of the engine's growl overhead and I really feels obliged to come out the workshop and watch, I am so weak willed to be distracted so easily

 

[woodbloke66]

Currently reading 'The Battle of Britain' by James Holland which is choc full of references to WW2 aircraft of the time on both sides as well as the political shenanigans that were going on in 1940. An interesting and very informative read - Rob

 

[AES]

I can very well understand that t8hants.

I remember being at the Farnborough Air Show some years back (working on my employer's stand) and suddenly both a colleague and I heard a very distinctive noise. We both said "Merlins" at the same moment, both rushed outside (leaving the stand temporarily deserted!) to be rewarded by the RAF BoB flight Spitfire, Hurricane, and Lancaster arriving in formation at the show, ready for their performances on the Public days starting the next day.

Great!

I also have an ex-work colleague who lives at Duxford and says even he does NOT get bored with the almost daily test flights of Spitfires, etc, that regularly fly over his house.

A fantastic sound, MUCH preferable to today's modern "fuel to noise converters" IMO, and once heard, never forgotten. (Mustangs sound good too, but a much different tone in there somehow - perhaps a whistle from that big radiator intake underneath? Dunno).

I can well understand why you're not getting much site work done these days!

 

[rafezetter]

Living very near what was then the Filton Airfield - all during the summer about once a week a Spitfire would fly around - presumably to keep it all running smoothly - I don't recall seeing a loop - but he often did steep dives then pull up just as steeply - the sound when he dived was just amazing and I never got tired of it.

Annoying it's gone as the Red arrows used to pull in for fuel several times a year too, going almost right over the house single file, then take off in formation.

Criminal they sold it for housing instead of making it a full on proper airport - everything they needed was right on the doorstep... but I digress.

Oh - I also see Apache gunships hereabouts on occasion, and Chinooks are a regular too.

 

[AJB Temple]

It's fantastic. We get them several times a week during the season. Various different Spits. We seem to be in a spot in Kent where they practice for the shows. Sometimes we get 20 mins of passes and aerobatics. Often very low. Next year I am going to fork out to fly in one.

 

[nabs]

I grew up in Shropshire and the planes on the way to Cosford air show used to fly over our school - unforgettable!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-xjUqiqVq0

Is worth watching - I watched it after reading Mary Ellis's obituary in The Times. Interestingly one of them (she, iirc) said the Spitfire was the easiest to fly because it became like an extension of you.
I used to speak to an ex WW2 pilot of one about twenty years ago who still used to fly down to Perranporth for a week's golf and he said the same - it was as if the plane ceased to exist when you flew it, you could fly it with your fingertips. He said the adrenaline rush you got when you dived out of the sun with another plane dead in your sights knowing you were about to consign him to history was better than any drug.

 

[Harbo]

When he was alive, the very rich builder Charles Church used to keep his aircraft including a Spitfire at a small airfield nearby. He often flew over our village, tremendous sound.
Sadly he was killed in it.


Rod

 

[woodbloke66]

Thousands were apparently built in small workshops in Salisbury as the Nazis used the cathedral spire as a navigation beacon and as such, the city was never bombed. Sadly, there appears to be very little remaining evidence of that wartime activity - Rob

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I started my alcoholic trajectory in the pub in the village where I was born. This was half a mile from an air station which got bombed ( probably on the same bombing runs as Falmouth). My mother recalled as a child picking up people's limbs in the road.
I learned the hard (and expensive way) to play an obscure card game called euchre, which is a very easy game to play but a very difficult game to play well - it used to irritate me like hell after playing three cards in a five card hand when someone told me what the last two I held held were (now I irritate other people by doing the same : by the bye ). The cards used to to stick to the table. They were always good playing cards, Waddingtons, but they still stuck. It was nothing more than decades of wax polish, so I volunteered to go in one day and scrub it off. When I went duly armed with meths, paper towels and wire wool. I scrubbed the creppe off and found scratched into the mahogany the names of the air force people stationed there, some of whom were remembered and who had died at the time. The local graveyard has the graves of the dead often unnamed commonwealth servicemen.

 

[Harbo]

Arthur Williams, a disabled pilot, did a great series on Ch4 a few weeks back, flying his Piper Cub to dozens of small airfields dotted around the U.K.
Lots of men in very large sheds rebuilding iconic aircraft including Spitfires and a Lancaster Bomber.
He was lucky to have a ride in the two seater Spitfire.
Also retired Red Arrow pilots can have another bash at displays in The Blades but flying this time in propeller planes.

Well worth a watch if you can find it on playback.

Rod

 

[woodbloke66]

Arthur Williams, a disabled pilot, did a great series on Ch4 a few weeks back, flying his Piper Cub to dozens of small airfields dotted around the U.K.

Rod

Saw those programs Rod...really great. Arthur's a natural on the telly and we watch all the stuff he does; a while ago he was also flying around remote Pacific islands which was also well worth a view - Rob

 

[selectortone]

My late father flew Beaufighters in the Middle East in WWII. He loved to tell me about the specially equipped Spitfire at their airfield in Egypt that had been stripped of all armament and was used by the met flight to get weather readings. It had the two-stage supercharged Merlin 60, and was as light as possible so that it could reach high altitudes. Any pilot on the base could do the dawn met flight each morning and he told me there was a waiting list of several weeks - because it went "like a dingbat". He flew it a couple of times and he said that, despite flying Meteors and Hunters after the war, those Spitfire flights were the best flying experiences of his entire career.

Btw: anyone interested in the development of the Merlin engine should find a copy of "Not Much Of An Engineer" by Sir Stanley Hooker. It's one of the best books of its genre I've ever read - and re-read countless times!

 

[woodbloke66]

Btw: anyone interested in the development of the Merlin engine should find a copy of "Not Much Of An Engineer" by Sir Stanley Hooker. It's one of the best books of its genre I've ever read - and re-read countless times!

Just found that on Kindle, looks an interesting and well written read; that's going on my Wish List. If you like stuff about aircraft try 'Wings On My Sleeve' by Capt. Eric 'Winkle' Brown who was probably one of greatest test pilots of all time - Rob

 

[Doug71]

My workshop is on an old RAF World War two bomber base. There is flying club here and because of all the history there are loads of old planes fly in.

There are two guys in the unit next to me building an 80% scale spitfire out of a kit that came from Australia, they have been on with it for years so don't know when we will see it in the air.

Some of the guys have connections to the Vulcan bomber, it was based not far from here so when it was on it's way back from an airshow it would often do a little private display over the our airfield, incredible sight and sound!

Doug

 

[DTR]

If you like stuff about aircraft try 'Wings On My Sleeve' by Capt. Eric 'Winkle' Brown who was probably one of greatest test pilots of all time - Rob

I read that earlier this year, a fascinating read

I too never get tired of seeing a Merlin fly over. We quite often get a Spitfire go over (ex-North Weald, maybe?), or aircraft going to/from the south coast during the airshow season.

We quite often get Chinooks and Apaches go over too. Last year on a very foggy day I heard an immense rumble. I darted from the workshop to see an extremely low Apache go over, shortly followed by his equally low wingman. I guess they were so low as the were flying under VFR

 

[selectortone]

If you like stuff about aircraft try 'Wings On My Sleeve' by Capt. Eric 'Winkle' Brown who was probably one of greatest test pilots of all time - Rob

Thanks - I've read it! Definitely one of the greatest test pilots of all time.

My favourite book of all in that genre (and I've read many!) is "Night Fighter"by C.F.Rawnsley, which I read first in my twenties and is another book I regularly re-read. It's the autobiography of the navigator/radar operator who was teamed up early in the war with John "Cats Eyes" Cunningham, probably the greatest British night-fighter pilot of WWII, and is about the development of night fighter radar and has some gripping stories of night engagements with enemy bombers and intruders, and later their own Mosquito intruder raids against German night fighters over Germany. It's written in a really engaging and humble style and is as much about his own self-doubt, lack of confidence and struggles with the early equipment. Excellent.

 

[AES]

+1 for the posts re the books "Not Much of an Engineer" and "Wings on my Sleeve". If you're into that sort of thing they're both very well worth reading.

Sort of related: my younger brother now lives in Lincs ("Bomber Country") and is not far from where the Lancaster "Just Jane" is based. Apparently it's already at the stage where they do regular taxi runs with it, and apparently it's been rumoured that one day (no dates given, deliberately) it MAY be back in full flying condition.

The owners are a pair of brothers (I forget the name) whose father/grandfather was a tail gunner in WWII and was killed in a Lanc on the infamous raid on Nuremburg in I THINK 1943.

Must be great to hear that thing taxying, and superb if the ever get it flying again. I THINK I'm right in saying that if/when they do it'll be the only one this side of the Atlantic apart from the RAF BoB Memorial Flight Lancaster (and only 1 other anywhere I THINK, in Canada).

In comparison, here (Switzerland) we "only" get/got a Constellation flying over sometimes (until it was grounded for a landing gear problem which I think will take years yet to fix), sometimes one of (was 3, now sadly only 2) Ju 52s, "Tante Ju" flying low, and even more rarely, a DC3, plus a Russian-built Antonov An 2 biplane owned by a Munich based lady lawyer who brings her machine every couple of years selling joy rides.

All these "big round" engines are well & good enough in themselves, & each with very distinctive sounds, but IMO anyway, they just cannot compare with the sound of Merlins.

(And that's another book BTW, "Sigh for a Merlin" by Alex Henshaw, who did a lot of testing, both production tests on every new machine, but also new prototype tests on several Spitfire Marks when they were in new development).

You shouldn't have started me off on my hobby horse t8hants!

Edit for an addition: Another +1 for the book "Night Fighter". If you like that you should also try "German Night Fighters v Bomber Command" by Martin W. Bowman. A fascinating view "from the other side" which also seems to show that Bomber Command losses (the highest of any force apart from the German U Boat crews BTW) were far more often due to German night fighters than has been previously fully acknowledged - particularly something called "Schragmusik" - read the book to find out more, but basically upward-firing cannon and/or machine guns, fired when the night fighter crept up below & behind the bomber, into his blind spot!

 

[selectortone]

(And that's another book BTW, "Sigh for a Merlin" by Alex Henshaw, who did a lot of testing, both production tests on every new machine, but also new prototype tests on several Spitfire Marks when they were in new development).

Yes! Another must read. I loved the way he used to navigate back to Castle Bromwich where he was the chief test pilot in bad visibility - he used the steam from the cooling towers of a nearby power station rising through the cloud blanket to orient himself. My dad was lucky enough to see Alex Henshawe do a display during the war and he said it was incredible.

edit: and thanks for the heads-up on "German Night Fighters v Bomber Command" by Martin W. Bowman. That's a new one for me, will search it out.

 

[DTR]

Sort of related: my younger brother now lives in Lincs ("Bomber Country") and is not far from where the Lancaster "Just Jane" is based. Apparently it's already at the stage where they do regular taxi runs with it, and apparently it's been rumoured that one day (no dates given, deliberately) it MAY be back in full flying condition.

The owners are a pair of brothers (I forget the name) whose father/grandfather was a tail gunner in WWII and was killed in a Lanc on the infamous raid on Nuremburg in I THINK 1943.

..........

Edit for an addition: Another +1 for the book "Night Fighter". If you like that you should also try "German Night Fighters v Bomber Command" by Martin W. Bowman. A fascinating view "from the other side" which also seems to show that Bomber Command losses (the highest of any force apart from the German U Boat crews BTW) were far more often due to German night fighters than has been previously fully acknowledged - particularly something called "Schragmusik" - read the book to find out more, but basically upward-firing cannon and/or machine guns, fired when the night fighter crept up below & behind the bomber, into his blind spot!

Well if you're going to bring up Bomber Command.......... My grandfather was a Wireless Op in Lancasters with 101 Sqd. Aircraft on 101 carried an extra crew member who operated jamming equipment to swamp the the Luftwaffe radios with noise. The jamming equipment was a double-edged sword as it could also be homed-in on by the night fighters. Consequently 101 Sqd had the highest losses of any squadron in Bomber Command. My grandfather had a few close scrapes including being shot up by a fighter, but thankfully made it through ok. He later went on to fly all over the Middle and Far East with Transport Command