How to fly a Spitfire – Part one

There was an instant there, flying out over the English Channel in a Supermarine Spitfire, in the very same skies in which 85 years ago it did so much to save the world from tyranny, when I looked down and checked it really was my hand on the stick and my feet on the rudder pedals. Because of all the things I’ve ever done, and you may know there have been a few, none has ever felt as unlikely to be true as this. Flying a Spitfire. Not flying in a Spitfire. Flying it.

I looked to the left and right and saw Reginald Mitchell’s revolutionary elliptical wings, stared ahead through a blur of propeller powered by a quad-cam, 48-valve, two-stage supercharged, 27-litre Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine and then back to my gauges. Which is when a really stupid thought occurred to me. I wanted to fly it well. Ridiculous because while I’ve taken the controls of a few light aircraft over the years, a glider and, memorably, a Hawker Hunter, I am not a pilot, nor anything close.

I don’t think there’s anything I could inadvertently do that might possibly damage it up here and in front sits a former RAF pilot with literal decades of experience flying this kind of aircraft who’ll take back control in half an instant if required. But all I can tell you is that when his voice crackled ‘your aircraft’ in my ears, it mattered more than I can say that I didn’t make a mess of it.