In Alfread Price’s Spitfire – A Documentary History, it quotes Shenstone as saying:
” It has been suggested that we at Supermarine had cribbed the wing shape from that of the He70 transport. This was not so. The elliptical wing had been used on other aircraft and its advantages were well known. Our wing was much thinner than that of the Heinkel and had a quite differnt section. In any case it would have been simply asking for trouble to have copied a wing shape from an aircraft designed for an entirely different purpose”
He did go on to say that the He70 did have an influence on the Spitfire tho…the smoothness of the skin impressed him, so he wrote to Heinkel to ask about that….
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