Spitfire Construction Numbers

Thanx chaps…..I have the latest edition of Spit The History and unfortunately it cannot help either! I shall check out my Putnams book (probably no good either!). Other Peter Arnold here I come.

Have fun chaps!

Tony

Hi Freddie,
From what I’ve heard,the Stirling drawings were not intentionally burnt.A Warewhouse at the Shorts factory in Belfast was engulfed by a monumental inferno way back in the 60’s,and a whole load of old jigs,tools and documentation for a whole host of old Short designs went up in smoke.

Well,

All Stirling construction drawings were destroyed, because they weren’t of use anymore. That’s also the reason why the Stirling Project has to reconstruct the drawings first before they can start reconstructing a Stirling. And there are more types of which the drawings don’t exist or just a small number of them have survived.

HTH

Freddy

It says on the front page of ‘Spitfire the History’ that around 50,000 drawings were ‘dumped’ on the RAF Museum in 1967 to stop them being burned! I wonder how many other records were?
mmitch.

That’s the trouble with the Spitfire construction numbers (and a lot of other types), because of the war they did not think it important enough to keep records of the construction numbers. Supermarine itself was infamous for there is no complete logical sequence where you can tie a RAF-serial to a factory number other than by guessing using known serial/number tie-ups.

Hope this helps

Freddy

Tony,

Good to see you back on here. Just had a quick glance at my copy of Spitfire The History; construction numbers aren’t listed amongst the RAF serial listings, and I couldn’t find anything in the appendices. Might be an idea to ask Peter Arnold over on WIX, if he doesn’t know, no-one will.

Steve

Sold my copy of “Spitfire – the History” a couple of months ago to buy the new one and not got it yet so going on memory.
I’m sure it’s got what’s supposed to be every serial no and mark but I don’t think there are any construction numbers.
Very impressive, potted history tells you which squadrons each a/c were allocated to and when SOC etc.

There were nearly 23,000 Spitfires produced. The book ‘Spitfire the History’ by E.B. Morgan & E. Shacklady contains the serials, service and fate (if known) of nearly all. I bought it in 1987 but it was recently updated. I doubt any website has this level of detail.
mmitch.

www.aviation_anorak.com

(Sorry. Really sorry. Just couldn’y help myself. Sorry.)