Quoting my reply from the other thread
I think in many ways folks are missing the essential point.
The machines are just that. What they represent are the men and women who built them, supported them and flew them.
If my grandson or daughter someday see’s a flying Spit that has been built around a ‘shaky provenence’, it will not matter one bit, as long as it might get them to look beyond the machine to the people.
How many of us out there are really that caught up in Spitfires (in this case) to the point where we know the types, serials of the survivors and all the details? I’d suggest the numbers is very few in the overall scheme of things.
Preserving the history is important, as is presenting the history as a tool for learning.
If “EN179”, real or imagined, gets one kid to learn the story or dig a bit deeper into the history, she’ll have done her job regardless of her pedigree.
When I saw P9306 as a kid at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, I couldn’t have told you what kind it was, if the paint was right or anything about it’s story. 40 years later I can talk Spits and then some. But it was that instance that I caught the Spitfire bug. Later it was AR501 at Duxford while I was in England for a a semester of College in 1980. Clipped winged Spit. That sent me into my Spit XII obsession. Again I knew nothing about it, but it got me going learning about the pilots and the history.
So I don’t know that I care if a flying Spit is all original, or how weak the provenence might be. The sound of that Merlin or Griffon and what that Spitfire represents in terms of the history and the people is what matters.
Otherwise it’s just bits of metal.
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