Spitfire

About

The Supermarine Spitfire is the work of designer R.J. Mitchell, whose Supermarine team at the Vickers-Armstrongs aviation works in Southampton produced one of the most iconic fighter aircraft ever built. The Spitfire prototype K5054 made its first flight on March 5, 1936, with Vickers chief test pilot Captain Joseph "Mutt" Summers at the controls — a flight famous for Summers' instruction afterward not to "touch anything," meaning the airframe was fundamentally right and needed no major modifications. R.J. Mitchell himself died of cancer in 1937, before he could see the type enter mass production, but his successor at Supermarine, Joseph Smith, oversaw the Spitfire's development through twenty-four major variants over the course of the Second World War.

The Spitfire's defining moment came in the Battle of Britain. From August through October 1940, RAF Spitfires (alongside Hawker Hurricanes) defeated the Luftwaffe's bid for air superiority over southern England — the first major battle in history fought entirely in the air. The Spitfire's combination of the elliptical wing (which allowed extreme maneuverability while delaying tip-stall in tight turns), the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, and the eight-gun armament gave the type genuine combat advantages over the Bf 109E it faced — although in numbers Hurricanes did most of the day-to-day fighting, and Hurricane pilots accounted for the majority of Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed during the Battle.

Total Spitfire production reached approximately 20,300 airframes across all variants. Surviving Spitfires remain among the most prized warbirds in the world, and the unmistakable elliptical-wing silhouette is one of the most-modeled WWII fighter subjects in modern RC scale flying.

In the simulator

A demanding warbird scale subject. The Spitfire in our sim has the responsive handling that the real airframe was famous for — the elliptical wing's authority on control inputs, the predictable stall behavior of a thin-section airfoil, and the kind of energy management a real Battle of Britain pilot trained for. A natural sibling of the Hurricane (CV Planes Pack 4) and P-51 Mustang (CV Planes Pack 5) — three of the most iconic Allied fighters of WWII.