Raiders crossing the coast near Dover. Get on their tail and close to 250 yards, where your eight Brownings converge on the sight.
Pilot's manual and history. Swipe or use the arrows to turn the pages.
Compiled for Tally-Ho. Figures are typical of the Mk I in 1940. Individual aircraft and published sources vary.
The Spitfire was designed at Supermarine in Southampton by a team led by Reginald Joseph Mitchell. His S.6 and S.6B racing seaplanes won the Schneider Trophy for Britain, taking it outright in 1931, and taught the team a great deal about speed, streamlining and powerful liquid-cooled engines.
Supermarine's first answer to an Air Ministry request for a new fighter, the gull-winged Type 224, was a disappointment. Mitchell's team started again with a private design, the Type 300: smaller and cleaner, with a retractable undercarriage, an enclosed cockpit, a thin elliptical wing and the new Rolls-Royce PV-12 engine that became the Merlin. The Air Ministry wrote Specification F.37/34 around it.
The prototype, K5054, first flew from Eastleigh on 5 March 1936 with chief test pilot Joseph "Mutt" Summers at the controls. On landing he is reported to have said "Don't touch anything." The RAF ordered 310 aircraft that June.
Mitchell was already seriously ill. He died on 11 June 1937, aged 42, before the first production aircraft flew. Joseph Smith took over as chief designer and led the Spitfire's development through the war.
Early Spitfires were built by Supermarine, part of Vickers-Armstrongs from 1938, at its works at Woolston and Itchen on the River Itchen in Southampton. The aircraft was hard to build quickly, and much of the early work, such as wings and tail units, was contracted out to other firms.
To build Spitfires in really large numbers, the government paid for a huge new "shadow factory" at Castle Bromwich near Birmingham. It was first run by Lord Nuffield's motor organisation and then, from May 1940, by Vickers. Castle Bromwich went on to build more Spitfires than anywhere else, roughly 12,000.
In September 1940 the Luftwaffe bombed the Woolston and Itchen works. Production was dispersed into requisitioned garages, bus depots, laundries and workshops across Southampton, Salisbury, Reading, Winchester and Trowbridge. Many of the workers were women and teenagers.
Across Britain and the Empire, towns, companies and individuals raised money through Spitfire Funds. A nominal £5,000 "bought" a fighter, and many Spitfires carried the name of the town or donor that had paid for them.
In all, more than 20,000 Spitfires were built, plus naval Seafires, in more than twenty major versions. It was the only British fighter in production throughout the Second World War.
The fuselage is a monocoque: a light-alloy skin riveted over a row of oval frames and lengthwise stringers, so that the skin itself carries much of the load. Flush rivets keep the surface smooth for speed. The engine hangs on steel tube bearers in front of the cockpit.
The famous elliptical wing, refined with aerodynamicist Beverley Shenstone, let the wing stay very thin while still holding the undercarriage, guns and ammunition. Its strength comes from a single main spar, built from square tubes that slot inside one another and get thinner towards the tip, and a stiff "D-box" formed by the thick leading-edge skin. The wing twists slightly towards the tip (washout), so the root stalls first and gives the pilot warning through a shudder.
All this made the Spitfire beautiful to fly but slow to build. Early on it needed far more hours of skilled work than the Hawker Hurricane.
The Spitfire I is powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin II or III: a liquid-cooled V-12 of 27 litres with a single-stage supercharger, giving about 1,030 horsepower. A water and glycol mixture carries heat to the radiator under the starboard wing, so watch the radiator temperature on the ground.
From 1940 squadrons switched to 100-octane fuel, which allowed an emergency boost of +12 lb for up to five minutes, worth around 25 to 30 mph at lower altitudes. In Tally-Ho that is the BOOST control.
The Merlin's float carburettor could starve the engine for a moment when the pilot pushed straight into a dive under negative g, something fuel-injected German engines did not suffer. In 1941 a simple restrictor designed by engineer Beatrice "Tilly" Shilling eased the problem.
Merlins were built at Rolls-Royce's Derby, Crewe and Glasgow works, by Ford at Trafford Park in Manchester, and later by Packard in the United States.
Early Mk Is had a two-blade wooden fixed-pitch propeller, then a de Havilland two-pitch three-blade unit. By the Battle of Britain most had been converted to constant-speed propellers.
The cockpit is small. Your shoulders nearly touch the sides. A small door on the left folds down to help you climb in, and the sliding hood above you can be locked open for take-off, landing and a quick exit. The crowbar clipped to the door is there to force your way out after a crash.
In the middle is the standard RAF blind-flying panel, the "basic six" found in every type from 1937, so a pilot could fly in cloud whatever he was flying.
In Free flight and on the airfield scramble mission you begin on runway 18 with a cold engine. The ENGINE START card on screen follows the real order of a Merlin start:
Watch the oil pressure rise, let the engine warm a moment, then release the brakes. The tail-down Spitfire's long nose hides everything ahead, so real pilots zig-zagged as they taxied to see past it.
Impatient? QUICK START on the card does it all at once.
Take-off. Open the throttle smoothly to full. The propeller's torque swings the nose left, so be ready with right rudder (steer right). The tail lifts at around 60 mph; ease the stick back at about 100 mph and she flies herself off.
Handling. The ailerons are light at low speed and stiffen up past 300 mph. The elevators are very sensitive, so small movements go a long way. Near the stall the aircraft shudders as a warning before a wing drops. Recover by easing forward and adding power.
Landing. The nose blocks the view straight ahead, so pilots flew a curved approach, keeping the runway in sight past the side of the nose until the last moment. Wheels down below 170 mph, flaps down, about 100 mph on final, close the throttle over the hedge and hold off until the aircraft settles. In Tally-Ho, AUTO LAND will fly the whole approach for you near Biggin Hill.
During the Battle of Britain, from July to October 1940, Fighter Command's Spitfires and Hurricanes defended Britain against the Luftwaffe. Radar stations along the coast spotted raids forming over France, and sector controllers at airfields such as Biggin Hill directed squadrons by radio telephone (R/T) to meet them.
The Bf 109E was a match for the Spitfire I. It was faster in a dive and carried cannon, but the Spitfire could out-turn it. Over England the 109 had very little fuel to spare, and that told in the Spitfire's favour.
Missions on the main menu set you a goal: gunnery practice on the balloons, an attack on the Channel convoy, a fighter sweep, or a scramble from Biggin Hill that ends with a landing.