I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (19 page)

The notion that you could dive into the pack and worry about what sort of plane you should
be shooting at is just plain silly. I can’t even do that on a pleasant day’s pheasant shooting. Often we’re told to shoot cocks only, but I find this almost impossible and regularly hit hens as well, along with a selection of owls, buzzards and songbirds. And that’s when I’m standing still. The notion of being able to determine the sex of a bird while running around a field at top speed is laughable.

Something else that’s laughable is the idea that ‘our young men had to shoot down their young men at the rate of four to one’. In fact by the second week of the Battle of Britain we had more Spits and Hurricanes than we did when the War started. Between July and October in 1940 747 Spitfires were delivered, 361 were destroyed and 352 damaged.

Yes, there was always a shortage of good pilots, but with plenty of Poles and Canadians flocking to Britain at this time it wasn’t as acute as you may have been led to believe.

So, on 15 September Germany launched its biggest attack yet. 200 bombers were launched against London. Even though they were protected by fighter escorts, 52 never made it back again. And the number of Spitfires lost? Seven. That
night Hitler postponed his plans to invade Britain indefinitely.

A year later, however, the Luftwaffe took delivery of the Focke-Wulf 190, which was better than the Spitfire in every respect. Had the Germans been equipped with this when the War started we’d have lost; it’s that simple. It was so good in fact that Churchill called an immediate halt to all fighter operations over Northern Europe.

But the Nazi advantage was short-lived because in 1943 the Spitfire Mark IX was introduced. It had a 37-litre, 2,050-horsepower engine with a two-speed, two-stage supercharger, a five-bladed propeller, two cannons and four machine guns, and it could fly for 850 miles at speeds up to 450 mph. More than 5,000 Mark IXs were made and suddenly the Germans’ FW190 looked like a horse and cart.

And this was the beauty of Mitchell’s original design. It was almost as though he’d realised that the first incarnation would need to be updated over and over again, and it was. They were used on aircraft carriers, they were used in streamlined form for photo-reconnaissance, they were turned into ground-attack mud movers. One
Spitfire even reached a speed of 680 mph. It became the RAF’s Swiss-Army knife.

The last time the Spit was used in a military operation was 1963. There was trouble in Indonesia, where the locals were still using old propeller-driven Mustangs. So to see how these would stack up against a modern jet fighter, the RAF staged a duel between their new Mach 2 Lightning and an old Spitfire.

Although the Lightning crew always had the option of lighting the burners and getting the hell out of Dodge, it was discovered that in a turning dogfight the Spit would get some rounds into its tormentor.

So, the Spitfire was more than just a good plane. It started out as a great plane and, having seen off the Nazis in 1940, became better and better and better.

However, those with plenty of time on their hands have found that statistically it was no better in action than the Hurricane. Both had an equal chance of victory.

Perhaps the Hurricane was a great plane too. From a pilot’s point of view it was certainly easier to fly and it was a better gun platform. From a government’s point of view it was cheaper to buy
than the £6,000 Spitfire and easier to mend. But from the point of view of those on the ground, the poor souls on the receiving end of all those German bombs, it was the Spitfire that won their hearts.

Technically, the Hurricane might have been able to win the Battle of Britain on its own. But for keeping up the spirits of the people on the ground while running rings round anything the Third Reich could throw at it? That was the job of the Spitfire, a symbol of British brilliance, a symbol of hope.

The fact is simple. The Spitfire looked good. It was every bit as dashing as the young men who flew it, and in flight it was as graceful as any bird. Its progress through the sky seemed effortless, as though it was simply riding the breeze and its Merlin engine was only there to provide a suitable soundtrack.

You had Mr Churchill on the radio explaining that we’d never surrender, and above you had the Spitfire, and you couldn’t help thinking: Yes, we can win this thing.

Possibly, just possibly, the Spitfire is the greatest machine ever made.

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John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company
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Buzz Pictures/Corbis Sygma
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Courtesy of Rolls- Royce Motor Cars
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Alamy
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Alamy
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Kobal Collection/Lucas Film/Twentieth Century Fox
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Kobal Collection/Lucas Film/Twentieth Century Fox
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Caught on the Surface
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aviation-images.com
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Topfoto
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National Maritime Museum
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Getty Image/Hulton archive
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Martin Bond/Science Photo Library
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John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company
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© Daniel Werner
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© Ian Woodrow
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Novosti (London)
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Courtsey of California Newsreel
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Bettman/Corbis
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Milepost 92
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NMM/Science and Society Picture Library
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US Air Force
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US Navy
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Reuters/Corbis
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US Navy Photo via Navsource
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Alamy
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Kindly supplied by Alfa Romeo
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NASA Dryden flight research centre
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Mirrorpix
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NASA
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NASA
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NASA Kennedy Space Center
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Bettman Corbis
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© Graham Endeacott
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TRH Pictures
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John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company
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United Artists/The Kobal Collection
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John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company
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It was a scientist with NASA who summed up Concorde better than anyone I’ve ever met.‘Putting a man on the moon was easy,’ he said,‘compared to getting Concorde to work.’

25 July 2000: Air France Concorde AF4590 leaves the runway in flames.She crashed two minutes later, killing 113 people.

I could not feel the road passing by through vibrations in the wheel and could not hear the Rolls-Royce’s engine, big and V12-ish though it was. I have had long soaks in the bath that were more stressful.

The Riva is fun, it’s fast, it’s exquisitely made and when you’ve finished looning around and you’re back on dry land you can look back and think to yourself, ‘That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.’

The leatherwork in white and turquoise seems to go so perfectly with the deeply polished mahogany hull, and the whole thing is finished off with a tail that tapers and flares just so.Now, that the most beautiful man-made creation should comefrom Italy is no surprise.There’s a passion for aesthetics in Italy that you simply don’t find anywhere else.