Spitfire: a Test Pilots Story Pdf, Epub, Ebook
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SPITFIRE: A TEST PILOTS STORY PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Jeffrey Quill | 336 pages | 01 Nov 1998 | Crecy Publishing | 9780947554729 | English | Cheshire, United Kingdom The First Of The Few - Spitfire () This last detail suggests that many location scenes with the three main characters ended up on the cutting-room floor. Posted to a secret forward- recon unit then training nearby at Poole, he had been given leave to star in the film, but was still so impressed by the young pilots that at the end of filming, he paid for a weekend for them all at the Savoy. For the finale, the pilots acted out a dogfight, performing various manoeuvres, including tackling enemy bombers played by a captured Heinkel. All footage had to be shot between combat operations, and some of the pilots you see at the beginning did not live to see themselves on screen. Left: Moyles Court manor outside Ringwood can be seen in the background of some shots. The young airman pictured was a real Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot. On 31st May , Howard and his manager took a commercial flight to Lisbon to attend the film's premiere in Portugal, where it received a best-film medal. He also discussed the possibility of an Anglo-Spanish co-production about Columbus, and flew back June 1st. It broke up in mid-air over the Bay Of Biscay, and everyone aboard was lost. Germany released a statement the shootdown was due to a misidentification. That is, in one fell swoop the Luftwaffe publicly downed the producer, director and star of a current propaganda film promoting British air supremacy. The alternative explanation was offered by Churchill after the war that incompetent enemy agents at Lisbon had misidentified Howard and his chubby, balding manager as Churchill and his bodyguard, both of whom were visiting Algiers at the time "a tragedy which much distressed me ". This theory features in TV historical documentary series like Churchill's Bodyguard. The scenario here is that Churchill was due to fly home from the Algiers Conference that day in a US Liberator bomber flying the same route over the sea, but heard of the assassination plan via Enigma intelligence decrypts and flew home a day later, using the excuse of a mechanical fault to protect the Enigma code-breaking secret. Portugal being neutral in the war, Lisbon was able to run commercial flights used by Axis as well as neutral and Allied VIPs Casablanca fans will remember how the plot revolves around the daily Lisbon plane. Being used by both sides at VIP level as well by neutrals, these flights normally operated without interference. Nevertheless, the flight out Howard originally planned to take was also attacked, managing to escape at wavetop level despite damage. Repaired, it was this same aircraft that was shot down on its return journey. Churchill himself later commented it was hard to understand the Germans could have been so stupid as to believe their agent's report he was travelling on a neutral civilian airliner. The idea agents believed Churchill, as the Nazis' number-one assassination target, would take an ordinary passenger flight via Lisbon over the Atlantic is a not very credible scenario. And the fact the plane was attacked on the way out contradicts the story. This seems to add credence to the scenario suggested by Churchill's Bodyguard the Prime Minister was able to fly home unmolested as the Germans believed for several days they had already shot him down, not realising or believing they had killed Howard. Howard's son, the Dorset-resident actor and art collector Ronald Howard, in his biography In Search Of My Father , suggests the Germans actually got the idea of killing him in this way from Hamlet from which Howard did readings in Lisbon. In the play, the thoughtful young prince who disputes the legitimacy of the new regime is sent across the sea to be assassinated on a pretext. Earlier, the turncoat broadcaster known as Lord Haw-Haw whose voice is heard in the film, and who had in lived outside Ringwood, near RAF Ibsley where Howard would film had announced Howard was on a death-list, and would be liquidated in good time. The headline in Goebbels's propaganda newspaper was "Pimpernel Howard has made his last trip, " a reference to his update of his Scarlet Pimpernel role in his previous anti-Nazi propaganda film Pimpernel Smith. There are also claims Howard had a real-life 'Pimpernel' role of his own, that he was on a secret diplomatic mission, the Columbus film project being a front for negotiating tactical concessions from Franco, who had been making discreet political overtures to Britain. The actor's son suggests the shootdown may have been a warning to Franco. German radio described the shoot-down as an "error of judgement. He was the very image of the gentle, normally harmless English aristocrat, and killing him would have done the Germans no good at all in the propaganda department. Howard was shot down just as the film premiered in the USA, and US as well as British reviews often mention the fact its director-star was killed when the Luftwaffe shot down an unarmed civilian passenger plane. The incident validated warnings by Howard and others that fascism was simply a veneer for a murderous tyranny. Mitchell, the film and the popular concert suite adapted from its music score thus also are a memorial to another talented patriotic Englishman, Leslie Howard. In the early scenes we see Mitchell struggling for recognition and having to resign in protest at a blinkered management who can't grasp the potential of his monoplane design "looks just like a damn bird with boots on". He also had his own pilot's licence. He did not simply work on a single 'dream' concept, but was a very practical man who designed over twenty different aircraft, from light planes to a long-distance flying boat that flew round the world, and was working on a high-speed heavy bomber when he died. The plans were destroyed in a Luftwaffe raid on the Southampton Vickers plant which killed many workers. Mitchell's first design, an open-cockpit gull-wing monoplane with fixed undercarriage just as we see in the sketch , was rejected when it proved unable to carry the required 8-gun load. Mitchell then designed a new closed-cockpit prototype, with a Rolls Royce engine and the now-familiar elliptical wing with retractable undercarriage, which became the Mark I. Though Mitchell died in , the Spitfire continued to be developed , the Vickers design team carrying out regular modifications to keep the plane competitive as Germany improved their fighter designs. It was the only British plane that was in continuous production throughout the war. The pilot played by David Niven is a composite character, there being no single pilot who flew the seaplane races and tested the Spitfire. Quill also flew the plane in the recreation shot especially for the film in November , of the prototype test flight which impressed the RAF brass. Mitchell's illness in the film is delicately unspecified, and depicted as coming later in life than it did, with an implication it was something that could be alleviated if not cured by rest. In fact Mitchell had the same condition that comedian Will Hay survived in the year the film came out: bowel or rectal cancer. Mitchell was not so lucky as Hay. In , he collapsed and underwent a colostomy, after having a malignant section of intestine removed. See still below. The German holiday depicted in the film was actually to convalesce from his operation, though the notion the trip alerted him to Nazi re-armament and bully-boy ambitions seems to have a basis in fact. Two days after the prototype's maiden flight on March 5, , the first German troops marched into the Rhineland demilitarized zone. In , after three years unstinting work on the Spitfire and his planned new high-speed bomber never built , he went to Vienna for specialist treatment, but returned soon after to die in Southampton. His year old son and biographer still campaigns to have the airfield renamed to commemorate this maiden flight. That Howard kept his slender boyish looks even at age 50 allowed him to credibly play a man ageing from his mids to age While thus on holiday watching the gulls wheel above the clifftops, Mitchell is inspired, in the manner of inventor Leonardo Da Vinci, to the possibility of a plane that would have the grace of a bird, and could swoop like one. One of the DVD issues of the restored film on the Odyssey label includes comments by the real Jeffrey Quill the basis of the David Niven character saying the idea Mitchell was inspired by gulls is fantasy. His Dictionary Of National Biography entry says his brilliance was the way, as a practical engineer, he integrated many refinements seen in various American Curtiss and German Junkers aircraft designs. The quote seems to be officially accepted as genuine, and was recently used as a question on University Challenge by Jeremy Paxman, who himself had nominated the Spitfire in as a British Design Icon. Mitchell's son and biographer has said "My father thought the name Spitfire was a bit silly. One reason he may have felt the name silly was that it had become associated with Hollywood. A series of films made from on, starring actress Lupe Velez, was known by her own personal nickname, the Mexican Spitfire. It was an old slang term for a type of fiery, hot-tempered female who will fight to do things her way.