Spitfire Wallpapers

Supermarine Spitfire Military aircraft, photo wallpapers: The Supermarine Spitfire was a single-seat fighter used by the RAF and many Allied countries in World War II. Produced by Supermarine, the Spitfire was designed by R.J. Mitchell, who continued to refine it until his death in 1937. Elliptical wings gave it a distinctive look and a thin cross-section, making it much faster than contemporary designs. Much loved by its pilots, the Spitfire saw service during the whole of World War II, in all theatres of war, and in many different variants. More than 20,300 examples of all variants were built, including two-seat trainers, with some Spitfires remaining in service well into the 1950s. It was the only fighter aircraft to be in continual production before, during and after the war. The aircraft was dubbed Spitfire by Sir Robert MacLean, director of Vickers (the parent company of Supermarine) at the time, and on hearing this, Mitchell is reported to have said, "...sort of bloody silly name they would give it." The word dates from Elizabethan times and refers to a particularly fiery, ferocious type of person, usually a woman. The name had previously been used unofficially for Mitchell's earlier F.7/30 Type 224 design. Supermarine's Chief Designer, R.J. Mitchell, had won three Schneider Trophy seaplane races with his designs, combining powerful Napier or Rolls Royce engines with minute attention to streamlining. These same qualities are equally useful for a fighter design, and in 1930 Mitchell produced such a plane in response to an Air Ministry specification (F7/30) for a new and modern monoplane fighter. This first attempt at a fighter resulted in an open-cockpit monoplane with gull-wings and a large fixed spatted undercarriage. The Supermarine Type 224 did not live up to expectations; nor did any of the competing designs which were also deemed failures. Mitchell immediately turned his attention to an improved design as a private venture, with the backing of Supermarine's owners Vickers. The new design added gear retraction, an enclosed cockpit, oxygen gear, and the much more powerful newly developed Rolls Royce PV-12 engine, later named the Merlin. By 1935 the Air Ministry had seen enough advancement in the industry to try the monoplane design again. They eventually rejected the new Supermarine design on the grounds that it did not carry the required eight-gun load, and did not appear to have room to do so. Once again Mitchell was able to solve the problem. It has been suggested that by looking at various Heinkel planes he settled on the use of an elliptical planform, which had much more chord to allow for the required eight guns, while still having the low drag of the earlier, simpler wing design. Mitchell's aerodynamicist, Beverley Shenstone, however, has pointed out that Mitchell's wing was not directly copied from the Heinkel He 70, as some have claimed; the Spitfire wing was much thinner and had a completely different section. In any event, the elliptical wing was enough to sell the Air Ministry on this new Type 300, which they funded by a new specification, F.10/35, drawn up around the Spitfire. The elliptical wing was chosen for superior aerodynamic attributes but it was a complex wing to construct and the Messerchmidt 109's angular and easy to construct wing offered similar performance (model per model) to the Spitfire. It has been reported that the Messerchmidt 109 took one-third the manhours to construct as the Spitfire. The prototype first flew on March 5, 1936. Performance was such that the Air Ministry immediately placed an order for 310. At the time it was still being "shaken out" by Vickers test pilots, even before the aircraft had been handed to them for their own flight testing. A feature of the final Spitfire design that has often been singled out by pilots is its washout feature, which was unusual at the time. The incidence of the wing is +2� at its root and −�� at its tip. This twist means that the wing roots will stall before the tips, reducing the potentially dangerous rolling moment in the stall known as a spin. Many pilots have benefited from this feature in combat when doing tight turns close to the aircraft's limits because when the wing root stalled it made the control column shudder giving the pilot a warning that he was about to reach the limit of the aircraft`s performance. [br]Production: To build the Spitfires in the numbers needed a whole new factory was built at Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham as a "shadow" to Supermarine's Southampton factory. Although the project was ultimately led by Lord Nuffield who was an expert in mass construction, the Spitfire was a bit too complex and Supermarine and Vickers engineers were needed. The site was setup quickly from July 1938 - machinery was being installed 7 months after work started on site. [br]Variants: There were 24 marks of Spitfire and many sub-variants. These covered the Spitfire in development from the Merlin to Griffon engines, the high speed photo-reconnaissance variants and the different wing arrangments. [br]Naval version: There also was a naval version of the Spitfire called the Seafire. It was specially adapted for operation from aircraft carriers: with an arrester hook, folding wings and other specialized equipment. However, like the Spitfire, the Seafire had a narrow undercarriage track, which meant that it was not well suited to deck operations. Due to the addition of heavy carrier equipment, it suffered from an aft centre-of-gravity position that made low-speed control difficult, and its gradual stall characteristics meant that it was difficult to land accurately on the carrier. These characteristics resulted in a very high accident rate for the Seafire. Compared with other naval fighters, the Seafire II was able to outperform the A6M5 (Zero) at low altitudes when the two types were tested against each other in WW2. Contemporary western carrier aircraft like the F6F Hellcat and the F4U Corsair, however, were considerably more powerful. Late-war Seafire marks equipped with the Griffon engines enjoyed a considerable increase of performance compared to their Merlin-engined predecessors. [br]The name Seafire was arrived at by collapsing the longer name Sea Spitfire. [br]Supermarine Spitfire [br] Mk.Ia Mk.Vb Mk.IXe LF Mk.XIVe [br]Wingspan: 36 ft 10 in (11.23 m) 36 ft 10 in (11.23 m) 36 ft 10 in (11.23 m) 36 ft 10 in (11.23 m) [br]Wing area: 242.1 ft� (22.5 m�) 242.1 ft� (22.5 m�) 242.1 ft� (22.5 m�) 242.1 ft� (22.5 m�) [br]Length: 29 ft 11 in (9.12 m) 29 ft 11 in (9.12 m) 31 ft 1 in (9.47 m) 32 ft 8 in (9.96 m) [br]Height: 9 ft 10 in (3.02 m) 11 ft 5 in (3.48 m) 12 ft 8 in (3.86 m) 12 ft 9 in (3.89 m) [br]Empty weight: 4,975 lb (2,257 kg) 5,090 lb (2,309 kg) 4,963 lb (2,251 kg) 6,688 lb (3,034 kg) [br]Loaded weight: 6,186 lb (2,806 kg) 6,770 lb (3,071 kg) 7,370 lb (3,343 kg) 10,258 lb (4,653 kg) [br]Engine: Rolls-Royce Merlin III Rolls-Royce Merlin 45 Rolls-Royce Merlin 66 Rolls-Royce Griffon 65 [br]Power: 1,030 hp (770 kW) 1,470 hp (1,096 kW) 1,575 hp (1,175 kW) 2,050 hp (1,530 kW) [br]Maximum speed: 363 mph (582 km/h) 378 mph (605 km/h) 401 mph (642 km/h) at altitude 450 mph (721 km/h). [br]

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