Maiden Flight of the Spitfire

Hugh ‘Stuffy’ Dowding was a man of independent mind. He believed in fairies, UFOs, and talking with the dead. As head of research at the Air Ministry in the early 1930s, he also believed – unlike some of his colleagues – in Britain’s need for fighter planes, and fast ones too. The RAF still relied on biplanes such as the Bristol Bulldog which couldn’t top 200mph; in 1931, the world air speed record was 407mph.

The plane which broke that record was built by Supermarine, owned by Vickers, under a design team led by R.J. Mitchell. Born in the village of Butt Lane outside Stoke in 1895, Mitchell began his career at a steam-train factory. He joined Supermarine in 1916, and in 1922 led it to the first of four victories in the Schneider Trophy, an international seaplane race.

Mitchell was fond of practical jokes: at the train works he made a pot of tea for a foreman he disliked, having urinated in it first. By 1933 he also had a secret: he was diagnosed with rectal cancer; an operation left him with a stoma. None of his colleagues knew.

But if the government wanted speed, who better to turn to? In January 1935 it agreed a contract for a fighter that combined Mitchell’s designs with a new, powerful engine from Rolls-Royce. Robert McLean, who chaired Vickers’ aviation division, named it after his teenage daughter Annie: he called her a little spitfire. ‘It’s the sort of bloody silly name they would give it,’ Mitchell said. He preferred ‘The Shrew’.

K5054, the prototype, had its maiden flight at Eastleigh at 4:35pm on 5 March 1936. ‘The new fighter fairly leapt off and climbed away,’ an onlooker said. In the cockpit was test pilot ‘Mutt’ Summers; it was said he could fly a kitchen table if someone fitted a propeller to it. The flight lasted eight minutes. ‘I don’t want anything touched,’ Summers said on landing. In further trials K5054 hit 380 mph. ‘Highly satisfactory’ was Dowding’s verdict. Two days later Hitler’s troops entered the Rhineland.

Mitchell’s team had triumphed, but the euphoria was short-lived. Mitchell’s cancer killed him in June 1937; he was 42. He once said that if he had his time again, he would have been a surgeon, not an engineer.