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Audio recording of Spitfire fly-past at the 2011 family day at RAF Halton, Buckinghamshire Supermarine Spitfire G-AWGB landing at Biggin Hill Airport, June 2024. The Supermarine Spitfire is a British single-seat fighter aircraft used by the Royal Air Force and other Allied countries before, during, and after World War II.
The Rolls-Royce Griffon engine was designed in answer to Royal Navy specifications for an engine capable of generating good power at low altitudes. Concepts for adapting the Spitfire to take the new engine had begun as far back as October 1939; Joseph Smith felt that "The good big 'un will eventually beat the good little 'un."
The Spitfire was also adopted for service on aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy; in this role they were renamed Supermarine Seafire. Although the first version of the Seafire, the Seafire Ib, was a straight adaptation of the Spitfire Vb, successive variants incorporated much needed strengthening of the basic structure of the airframe and ...
In the summer of 1943 an example of the EZ 41 developed by the Zeiss company was tested, but was refused because of too many faults. In the summer 1942, the Askania company began work on the EZ 42, a gunsight which could be adjusted for the target's wingspan (in order to estimate distance to the target). The EZ 42 was made up by two major parts ...
The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine originally came with a direct carburettor, prone to cut-out due to fuel flooding in negative G. Miss Shilling's orifice was a very simple technical device created to counter engine cut-outs experienced during negative G manoeuvres in early Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aeroplanes during the Battle of Britain.
The Ministry rejected the 312 as Supermarine's design office was already too fully engaged on the Spitfire design to work on the alternative wing. The twin-engined Westland Whirlwind was accepted for the specification.
Supermarine Spitfire variants powered by early model Rolls-Royce Merlin engines mostly utilised single-speed, single-stage superchargers. The British Supermarine Spitfire was the only Allied fighter aircraft of the Second World War to fight in front line service from the beginnings of the conflict, in September 1939, through to the end in ...
The work was published in 1936. [3] The phenomenon became known as the "Meredith effect" and was quickly adopted by the designers of prototype fighter aircraft then under development, including the Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane whose Rolls-Royce PV-12 engine, later named the Merlin, was cooled by ethylene glycol. An early example of ...