Chapter I · 1913–1931
The Schneider Inheritance
Before the fighter, a racing seaplane — and a designer in a hurry
The Spitfire begins over water. Supermarine of Southampton built flying boats, and from 1919 it entered the Schneider Trophy — the international seaplane race that became, by accident, the world’s most expensive aerodynamics laboratory. Its chief designer from 1919 was Reginald Joseph Mitchell, a locomotive engineer’s apprentice from Stoke-on-Trent who had joined the company at twenty-one and was running its design office by twenty-four.
Mitchell’s S.4, S.5 and S.6 racers grew steadily cleaner, faster and more alarming. In 1931, with the Treasury declining to pay and Lady Lucy Houston writing a cheque for £100,000 in disgust, the S.6B won the trophy outright for Britain — three wins in a row — and days later took the world air speed record past 400 mph. Behind its cowlings sat the Rolls-Royce ‘R’ engine, a 2,350-horsepower sprint version of everything Rolls-Royce knew. The lessons of that engine flowed directly into a new private-venture V12 the company called the PV-12. It would be renamed the Merlin.
The S.6B that won the 1931 race hangs today in London’s Science Museum; its sister S.6A is the centrepiece at Solent Sky in Southampton — the city where every one of these aircraft was designed and built.
Chapter II · 1934–1936
K5054 — The Prototype
One failure, one redesign, eight minutes at Eastleigh
Mitchell’s first attempt at a fighter, the Type 224 of 1934, was a gull-winged, fixed-undercarriage disappointment that lost to a biplane. His response was to throw it away and start again without waiting to be asked: retractable undercarriage, enclosed cockpit, the thinnest wing anyone dared, and the new Rolls-Royce PV-12. The Air Ministry liked the drawings enough to write specification F.37/34 around them and pay for a prototype.
That prototype, K5054, lifted off from Eastleigh aerodrome on 5 March 1936 with Vickers’ chief test pilot ‘Mutt’ Summers aboard. The flight lasted about eight minutes. Summers’ verdict on landing — “I don’t want anything touched” — has been polished by retelling, but the substance held: within three months the Air Ministry ordered 310 of them, the largest production order ever placed for a British aircraft to that date.
The name came from the chairman of Vickers, Sir Robert McLean, who called his famously fierce daughter Ann “a little spitfire.” Mitchell’s review of the choice survives verbatim.
Mitchell saw the first production contracts but not the first production aircraft. He died of cancer on 11 June 1937, aged forty-two. His successor Joseph Smith — a name history has treated far too quietly — would carry the design through every mark that followed.
Chapter III · 1938–1939
Into Service
19 Squadron, Duxford — and a factory learning the hard way
The elliptical wing that made the Spitfire beautiful also made it miserable to build. Supermarine’s works could not come close to the required rate, production was scattered across garages and bus works around Southampton, and the first production Mk I did not fly until May 1938 — two years after the order. On 4 August 1938 the first of them was delivered to No. 19 Squadron at Duxford, which thus became the first Spitfire station in the world.
The Mk I that squadrons received did 362 mph on a 1,030 hp Merlin and carried eight Browning machine guns in that impossible wing. Pilots stepping out of biplanes found a machine with no vices they could name and one they could: a long nose that hid the ground on landing, and a narrow-track undercarriage waiting to punish swagger. They forgave it everything.
By the outbreak of war in September 1939 the RAF had 306 Spitfires on strength. A shadow factory the size of a town was rising at Castle Bromwich outside Birmingham to build them by the thousand — badly at first, then, under Vickers management, better than anyone.
Duxford, that first Spitfire station, is now IWM Duxford — and holds more airworthy Spitfires on its grass than any other airfield on earth. Some symmetry is earned.
Chapter IV · Summer 1940
The Battle
The few, the fund, and a reputation fixed forever
The arithmetic of the Battle of Britain belongs to the Hurricane, which was more numerous and shot down more of everything. The legend belongs to the Spitfire, and the Luftwaffe helped write it: German pilots preferred to report having been bested by Spitfires whatever had actually hit them, a phenomenon RAF pilots called “Spitfire snobbery.” Where possible, Fighter Command sent the Spitfires up against the Messerschmitt Bf 109 escorts and let the Hurricanes take the bombers.
Against the 109 the Mk I was, for the first and last time in the war, in an almost perfectly fair fight: faster in the turn, slower in the dive, evenly matched enough that the outcome came down to the men. The public, watching contrails from their gardens, chose their favourite instantly. When Lord Beaverbrook’s ministry invented the Spitfire Fund — £5,000 notionally bought one, sixpence bought a rivet — towns, dog shows and prisoner-of-war camps competed to buy Spitfires by name. Nobody started a Hurricane Fund.
Chapter V · 1941–1943
The Mark Race
The Fw 190 shock, and the stopgap that saved the day
After the Battle came the grind. The Mk V — essentially a Mk I fuselage with a stronger Merlin 45 and cannon — became the workhorse of 1941 and the most-built Spitfire of all: 6,487 of them, fighting over France, Malta, the Western Desert and, from carriers and crates, everywhere else. Then in September 1941 the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 appeared over the Channel and comprehensively outclassed it. Fighter Command’s casualty ledgers turned ugly for nine straight months.
The proper answer, a redesigned Mk VIII, would take too long. The emergency answer was to take the two-stage, two-speed supercharged Merlin 61 and bolt it into the existing Mk V airframe. The result — the Mk IX — was meant to be a stopgap. It restored parity with the Fw 190 at a stroke, stayed in production to the end of the war, and 5,656 were built, plus over a thousand Packard-Merlin sisters called the Mk XVI. Pilots who flew it tend to use the word ‘perfect’ and decline to elaborate. It was Mk IX pilots of 401 Squadron RCAF who, in October 1944, shared the first Allied gun kill of an Me 262 jet.
The most famous Spitfire flying today, MH434, is a 1943 Mk IX with wartime kills, never crashed, never fully rebuilt — based at Duxford and still displayed all summer.
Chapter VI · 1943–1945
Griffon Power
Same name, different animal
Rolls-Royce’s Griffon was a third bigger than the Merlin and descended from the old Schneider ‘R’ racing engine, which felt appropriate. Fed into the Spitfire it produced a machine the founding pilots would barely have recognised: the low-level Mk XII first, then from early 1944 the definitive Mk XIV — 2,050 horsepower, a five-blade propeller, well over 440 mph, and a takeoff swing so vicious that the checklist amounted to full opposite rudder and religion. The propeller also turned the other way to a Merlin’s, which surprised precisely everyone once.
The Griffon Spitfires arrived in time for the V-1 flying bombs, and were among the few fighters fast enough at low level to catch them. XIV pilots ran up scores of 300-plus bombs destroyed, some by gunfire and some — when the ammunition ran out — by sliding a wingtip under the bomb’s wing and flicking it into the ground, a technique no instruction manual ever endorsed and every pilot describes with suspicious fluency.
Chapter VII · The specialists
Odd Jobs
Cameras, floats and the wrong sort of runway
Strip the guns and paint it blue: the photo-reconnaissance Spitfires were among the most valuable of all. Unarmed, waxed and overfuelled, the PR marks flew alone across occupied Europe relying on nothing but height and speed; the Griffon-engined PR.XIX, pressurised and good for around 460 mph, was arguably the finest piston-engined reconnaissance aircraft ever built. Some of the war’s most consequential photographs — Peenemünde among them — came home in a Spitfire’s belly.
There were stranger variations. A handful of Mk V and IX floatplane conversions taxied hopefully around Scottish lochs and the Nile. And the Fleet Air Arm took the most land-bound aeroplane imaginable — that lovely narrow undercarriage, that long blind nose — and put it on aircraft carriers as the Seafire. It was, in the words of its pilots, a thoroughbred asked to pull a milk float: sublime once airborne, heartbreak in the wires. Some 2,334 were built regardless, and Seafires flew combat over Salerno, Normandy, the Pacific and finally Korea in 1950 — the last British Spitfire variant ever to fire its guns in anger.
The Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton and IWM Duxford both hold Seafires; Duxford’s based operators have returned one to the air — listen for the different snarl of its hooked, clipped-wing silhouette.
Chapter VIII · 1945–1948
Last of the Line
The F.24, and a design stretched to its final rivet
The last family of Spitfires — F.21, F.22, F.24 — wore a new, stiffer wing with four cannon, and by now barely a part interchanged with the 1938 original. The type had roughly doubled its engine power, nearly doubled its weight, and added ninety-odd miles an hour, all on the same silhouette. The final aircraft, an F.24, left the line on 20 February 1948, closing the books at 20,351 Spitfires across twenty-four marks — the only Allied fighter in continuous production for the entire war, and the RAF’s last front-line piston fighter family.
Castle Bromwich alone had built more than half of them. Twenty years after that troubled shadow factory opened, its output stood as the largest production run of any British combat aircraft — a record it still holds and, barring surprises, always will.
Chapter IX · 1948–1957
The Long Goodbye
Foreign flags, weather flights, and a last bow at Biggin Hill
The Spitfire’s retirement was busier than most careers. Surplus aircraft flew for more than thirty air forces; in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, Egyptian, Israeli and RAF Spitfires all flew against one another in every combination the geometry allowed — the type’s strangest and saddest chapter. The RAF’s last operational sortie came on 1 April 1954, a PR.XIX photographing bandit country over Malaya.
And then, very Britishly, the last working Spitfires in the world spent three years measuring the weather. The civilian-crewed THUM Flight at Woodvale sent a PR.XIX up every morning with a thermometer until June 1957. When it disbanded, the three aircraft — PM631, PS853, PS915 — flew to Biggin Hill to form the Historic Aircraft Flight: the direct ancestor of today’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. The RAF has, in the accounting sense, never actually retired the Spitfire. It merely changed the duty roster.
All three THUM veterans are still airworthy with the BBMF at Coningsby nearly seventy years later — the longest continuous service records in RAF history.
Chapter X · The present day
Still Flying
Roughly 240 survive. Around 60 fly. Britain keeps most of them busy.
No other Second World War aircraft survives in such numbers or such health. Of the roughly 240 Spitfires still in existence, around sixty are airworthy at any given time — the number drifts upward, because a small British industry now returns wrecks and gate guardians to the sky at a rate the 1950s scrapman would find bewildering. A flying Spitfire today changes hands for several million pounds; a dig-site data plate for rather less, with optimism included free.
Better still, the survivors work. They display all summer, they carry paying passengers in two-seat conversions, and six of them remain on the strength of the Royal Air Force itself. The full squadron list of where to find them — flying and static, museum by museum — follows below, with links into the main gazetteer for opening hours, ratings and the all-important tea hut intelligence.