AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2014 - 68

your airplane. Have fun." Have fun? My
brain was still trying to catch up with
the chain of events that started when
I first pushed the throttle forward, five
miles earlier. How could I not have
fun? I was flying a Spitfire!
THE BOULTBEE FLIGHT ACADEMY

The Boultbee Flight Academy offers an
introductory course that takes pilots
through two and a half hours of flight
time: an initial hour in a de Havilland
Chipmunk, then 45 minutes each in a
Harvard (what we here in the States
call a T-6 Texan), and the school's centerpiece-G-ILDA, a two-seat Spitfire
TR.9. There is also a 10-hour Spitfire
transition course for those who have
the desire-and means-to solo.
So, how much does it cost? A lot.
Flight time in the United Kingdom is
measured from wheels up to wheels down,
and an hour of it in G-ILDA will set you
back roughly $5,500. That's more per hour
than a P-51, a MIG-21, and almost anything
else you can pay money to spend time with.
It's more than I paid for my last car. But flying a Spitfire was a dream that I'd had since
I was a small boy "flying" a cardboard box
in my parents' living room. So when some
friends tipped me off about Boultbee, I
knew it would be only a matter of time
before I cashed in all the spousal favors I'd
earned in 18 years of marriage, and signed
up to spend a few hours living my dream.
SPITFIRE TRAINING

My first full day at Boultbee was spent
learning the Spitfire's systems with crew
chief Mark "Bing" Crosby. I learned that, in
many ways, the airplane resembles a human
body. On the surface, it's a thing of beauty,
but if you peek inside, you'll find such a
bewildering tangle of tubes and unrecognizable doodads that you marvel the thing
can work at all. The maze of steel and copper tubing feeding pneumatic and hydraulic
pressure to flaps, radiator flaps, propeller,
and landing gear is a Gordian knot. To fully
understand how they all work together, as
Bing said, you need to either be very clever
or completely mad.
My flying instructor, Al Pinner, was a
former Royal Air Force Harrier and F/A-
18 Hornet pilot. His precision, clarity, and
"no problem" demeanor give the impression that anything short of shedding pieces
68 | AOPA PILOT January 2014

of the airframe is just another learning
opportunity.
The first real challenge of actually flying a Spitfire is getting it to the runway. It
was never intended to be taxied on pavement, and a few minutes on the apron with
its single-lever pneumatic brakes and castering tailwheel will humble even the most
seasoned pilots.
Once on the runway, it's customary-
because of the long nose-to line up at
a 30-degree offset, to get a clear view of
where you're heading once you add power.
You crank the throttle friction lock as tight
as it will go-the need for this will become
evident in a moment-and smoothly push
the throttle forward to six inches of boost.
Unlike other high-performance piston aircraft, in which a manifold pressure
gauge indicates the absolute air pressure
inside the engine intake, the Spitfire's gauge
measures the difference between ambient
and internal pressures. The standard six
inches of boost (about 36 inches of manifold
pressure) yanks the lightly loaded Spitfire
forward with alarming acceleration across
the grass. The boost gauge reads all the way
up to 24 inches for wartime operation with
high-octane gas. Bouncing and careening
down Duxford's grass runway, I'm dancing
like mad on the rudder pedals to keep everything pointed in the right direction.
The airspeed indicator betrays the
Spitfire's range: 90 mph-rotation speed-
is just a smidge off the six-o'clock resting
position of the needle, and the indicator

markings go around the inner face
one and a half times, up to 480 mph.
Almost as soon as the needle comes
alive, I'm at 75 mph, the speed at which
Al directed me to raise the tail-"But
not that much!" he corrects. You want
it just high enough that the airplane
won't lift off before you're ready. By
the time I've got the tail where I want
it, the ASI is passing 95, and the wheels
give me one last good bounce.
There's no time to sit back and
savor the experience. With a positive
rate of climb, it's time for the landing-gear dance: Apply the brakes with
the right hand on the spade-mounted
lever. Then switch hands; left hand
from throttle to stick and right hand to
the gear lever. If I failed to sufficiently
tighten the throttle friction lock, now's
the time it will slip back to idle-not
what I want with that lovely English countryside so close below.
My right hand pushes the gear lever
through the much-rehearsed sequence:
push down (two, three); smoothly forward;
push up (two, three, four), and wait for the
pop-back to tell me that the gear is locked
up and pressurized. Then switch hands
back to the throttle quadrant. Reduce boost
to four inches, bring rpm down to 2,400, and
trim for climb at 140 mph.
I take a quick breath and bank into the
crosswind turn. The sweep of the countryside takes me by surprise as the wing comes
down and the graceful nose arcs around.
That's the moment time stands still. I'm
flying a Spitfire. All at once, the Byzantine
systems and plumbing under the hood are
forgotten; the numbers, sequences, and
procedures fall away. What remains is the
singular experience of my hands on the stick
and throttle of a craft that will leap to do my
bidding almost before the thought has fully
formed in my head.
The intercom is almost useless with the
Merlin producing so much power. I retard
the throttle to zero boost and tell Al, in the
back seat, that I'm going to make a few
S-turns to get a feel for the airplane. That's
when the tower calls incoming traffic and
the dogfight begins.
FLIGHT CHARACTERISTICS

Once I'd recovered from the first bout of
unexpected excitement of the flight, I began
feeling out the flight characteristics that

AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2014