Tempest; “Bea” Beamont reckoned that it could outperform anything else that he came up against, and I’d accept his testimony, any time.
Edgar

Duck egg green..or..

Unfortunately for one theory, the official MAP instructions didn’t include top, and under, surfaces in the same sentence, so the idea that all were Type “S”, doesn’t hold up. In 1940/1 the wording, for the upper surfaces, was “Temperate land scheme camouflage, consisting of two colours, dark green and dark earth”; the separate reference to the under-surfaces was “matt black, duck-egg blue (Sky Type “S”) or a combination of these colours, at the discretion of commands.” There is an interesting entry in the Vickers ledger, of mods, on the Spitfire, which gives mod 697 as “To introduce improved painting scheme using DTD 517 type “S” finish All Marks”, and is dated 25-9-42, so it would appear, from that, that matt paints, on the upper surfaces, remained in use until then. I have a colour card, issued by the British Standards Institution, against B.S.381C:1971, for “210 Sky matt finish,” and it also states that “This colour is correlated with colour 5-059 (B.S.2660) and also corresponds to that formerly known as colour 9A of H.M.G. Aircraft series.” From that, it doesn’t sound as though there was any (official) difference between wartime and post-war airframes. It should be remembered, too, that not all paints were top-quality cellulose, during the war; according to Ian Huntley, some were a distemper type, and faded, quite markedly, ro a chalky consistency.
Edgar