What does it take to restore a World War Two Spitfire?
bbc.com
bbc.com
True, except it was hardly perfect engineering. If you nosed it hard into a dive, the carburetors would spill fuel into the cockpit. Pilots learned to roll it on its back and pull it down that way. The Me109 was fuel injected and didn't have that problem. The 109 also took half as many hours to produce.
All WW2 airplanes had their various problems that would kill the unwary pilot. The good pilots would avoid the defects in their airplane and play to the defects in the enemy machine.
Perhaps you're thinking of the typhoon & tempest which had a problem of exhaust leaking into the cockpit. Solution: pilot wad required to always use the oxygen mask.
The Merlin engine had other issues - it was very sensitive to battle damage. This is in contrast to the engine on the P47, which could take a lot of damage and keep running.
But the R-2800 Double Wasp is an engineering triumph in its own right. Hellcat, Corsair, Thunderbolt, Black Widow, Bearcat... they put it in everything.
@Agathos you have to remember history to understand why the RAF selected this design.
The conflicting design problems at the time (mid 1930's) dictating power plant choice? How do we create a fighter with enough power and speed that will allow bombers & fighters to be shot down using the limited resources we have (dollars, manpower and materials) post, "great depression"?
The answer, the Rolls Royce V12, inline Merlin. It did the job. Especially in '39 and 1940, when the only thing separating a full out invasion by Nazi Germany was 22 miles of water and the sky.
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_engine#Radial_versus_in...
- http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2920/why-are-inl...
- http://www.warbirdsforum.com/topic/545-radial-vs-inline-engi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice
edit: I see now that gp2000 had posted that link hours before I commented. I had missed it, but ended up at the same place.
A great article to read, "Chuck Hawks" and "Rip Collins" (who flew both) comparison of 47 and 51. ~ http://www.chuckhawks.com/p47.htm
Any fighter performs better under positive G's than negative G's. So of course pilots try to pull positive G's when they can. Good tactics at 10,000 feet.
But here's a twist: I have read that aggressive A-10 Warthog pilots will do this a few hundred feet off the ground. I.e. before they crest a ridge they invert, so they can duck back under the ridge line more quickly.
That's what Tom Wolfe would call "the right stuff".
When the reconstruction was being built, the restorers had to track down parts from Spitfires that were no longer airworthy to be as authentic as possible.
Source: I know somebody who spent a lot of time talking to somebody involved in the restoration.
The yellow diamond of reactive paint on the wing was supposed to give early warning of a gas attack by turning black.
Do they mean gas attack like, mustard gas attack or my wing is shot up and leaking fuel?
Considering how rare the parts are and the difficulty of finding someone qualified to actually do the work, $4mil is certainly very reasonable, especially if the Spitfire is actually flight worthy.
@nbevans. I personally like Spitfire very much. But nothing is published on BBC without dual or triple purpose these days.
B - There are plenty still flying. There used to be a lot more actually, as they were sold off the public quite cheaply after the war. Many many have been lost to accidents over the years - The P-51 is NOT a forgiving airplane.
C - The biggest challenge - Really the ONLY major challenge, airframe/structural work is basically a solved problem - are the engines. The Rolls Royce Merlin engine, used in both the Spitfire and the P-51, was last manufactured in 1950. While there were many built (and thus many to scavenge from), that inventory is only shrinking as engines are replaced or overhauled. Basically the world's entire stock of Merlin parts lives in a group of semi trailers in the California desert (http://www.51-factory.com/merlin_overhaul.html) - when they're gone, they're gone.
If one starts building new parts from scratch there may come a moment where people say something has become a replica, more so if one also uses new technology (philosophers discuss this as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus).
The weird thing, though, is that the road along which one gets to an object is more important than the end result in determining authenticity. Replace all parts of a spitfire until just one piece remains original, and you have an original spitfire. Build a replica, buy that one original part, and include it, and you still have a replica.
A nice example is HMS Victory, a wooden warship that saw battle at Trafalgar. It is kept afloat by replacing its parts. By now around 20% of the original wood remains (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/05/world/europe/hms-victory/). Yet, we think of it as the original ship.
However, it is not a given that replacing all parts makes a new object. The Ise grand shrine in Japan is over 2000 years old, but gets rebuilt with new materials every 20 years (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine)
My personal opinion is that wrecks dredged up from swamps and such should be put into museums as is. Flying airplanes should be replicas, made as close to the original specifications as the owner wants.
For example, a few years ago there was a project at Paine Field to build flying replicas of the Me262. They took apart an original to measure everything and make a specification. As a concession to safety, they used modern jet engines and instrumentation, and used lead weights instead of guns (to maintain proper balance).
I would have bought one if I could afford one!
Nobody would actually want to fly an original, because the engines only lasted about 20 hours, were extremely unreliable, and nobody bothered with corrosion protection (didn't expect the machine to last long enough to corrode).