The prototype Spitfire, serial number K5054, made its first flight from Eastleigh aerodrome outside Southampton on 5 March 1936. The pilot was Captain Joseph Mutt Summers, Supermarine’s chief test pilot. The flight lasted eight minutes. When Summers landed he reportedly said “Don’t touch anything.” The instruction reflected the relative smoothness of the test and Summers’s desire to establish a clean baseline before modifications began, rather than any claim that the aircraft was complete.
Reginald Mitchell was present at Eastleigh for the first flight. He was forty-one years old and had been diagnosed with rectal cancer in 1933. He had undergone surgery, returned to work, and continued designing the aircraft that had been under development since 1934. Mitchell died in June 1937, fifteen months after the first flight and a year before the Spitfire entered RAF service. He did not live to see what the aircraft became.
What Mitchell Had Built Before
Mitchell’s reputation rested substantially on his Schneider Trophy seaplane designs before the Spitfire. The Supermarine S.6B won the Trophy outright in 1931 at a speed of 379 miles per hour, a record for fixed-wing aircraft at the time. The aerodynamic lessons of the Schneider racers fed directly into the Spitfire’s distinctive elliptical wing, which was designed to accommodate a wide thin cross-section carrying the retracting undercarriage and allowing high-speed aerodynamic efficiency. The wing design was difficult and expensive to manufacture; its performance advantages made the cost acceptable.
The Supermarine factory was on the Woolston bank of the Itchen in Southampton. Mitchell’s design office was part of the factory complex. The aircraft he designed were built within a few hundred metres of the slipway from which the seaplane racers had been launched. The geography of Southampton – the Itchen, the deep water, the aerodrome at Eastleigh – was the physical context in which the Spitfire was made.
Eastleigh and the Supermarine Factory
Eastleigh aerodrome had been operating since 1910 and was the primary test facility for Supermarine aircraft. The factory at Woolston produced the components and sub-assemblies; final assembly and testing took place at Eastleigh. The airport that now occupies the site is Southampton Airport, opened as a commercial facility in 1932 and still operating on substantially the same ground.
The Supermarine factory was bombed on 26 September 1940 during the Battle of Britain, by which point the Spitfire it had produced was central to the RAF’s defence. The bombing effectively destroyed Southampton’s main Spitfire production facility. Production was dispersed to smaller workshops and garages across Hampshire as a result – a makeshift response that maintained output. The original factory site in Woolston is now a housing development. The airport at Eastleigh retains a small memorial to the first flight. Mitchell is commemorated with a statue in Southampton and a secondary school in the city bears his name.
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