Man hours to make a Spit

As regards the man hours to make a Spitfire, I found this website which seems (and I stress that) to be well researched (there are a lot of interesting documents relating to WW2), but it doesn’t have any references for these figures.

http://www.alternatewars.com/WW2/UK_Production_Costs.htm

It ranges from 7,360,000 man hours for a battleship, down to five man hours for a sten gun. The Spit comes out at 15,200 man hours, although it doesn’t state which model and at which time. I would imagine that the man hours required decreased as the war continued. It also states that the man hours to make a 109G dropped from 5,700 in 1942 to 2,000 in 1944, although that seems rather low to me.

A Little Further Information

It was probably a cunning plot from our “intelligence service” to tie up dozens of engineers trying to get the sabre running then kill off a German test pilot when the tail fell off.

I am currently reading Geheimflüge – Der Versuchverband des Oberkommandos der Luftwaffe 1939-45 by Smith, Creek and Petrick (originally published in English, but mine is the German version published by Motor Verlag in 2006), which includes a section on captured allied aircraft tested by Zirkus Rosarius.

First point is that the above comment may not be too far away from the truth:
“Erich Sommer remembers the frustration of one of the pilots who persistently tried to start the “damned thing (EJ956)” in front of the Zeppelin hanger in Orly in order to fly to Oranienburg. “A pile of used cartridges lay” he reported “all around – they didn’t have the necessary power and the correct ones were not available.””

I can also fairly confidently assert that the aircraft in the original picture at the top of this thread is not EJ956. Every single image I have seen of EJ956 has a small teardrop bulge above the pilot’s head which contains his rearview mirror. This is absent from the Ebay aircraft.

Some early Typhoons had this bulge, some didn’t, and the lack of a change in the mark number does nothing to help us poor anoraks. I suppose it is possible that EJ956 suffered an accident at some point and it was replaced with either a panel from another wrecked Typhoon, or a locally made panel, but since it doesn’t occur in any other photos I think this unlikely.

Don´t forget Mr Milch.

The real power behind the throne was Erhardt Milch. He organised the Lw in its early years and was there when Goering was fighting the Communists and doing the dozen other jobs he had (i.e. police chief of Prussia).

Udet was a liability and the main root cause of the He177, Me210 and Bomber B fiascos. He let the industrialists have their flights of fancy and cost the Lw a generation of aircraft.

Milch was different: “When Milch pisses ice comes out.” Anything the German aircraft aircrat industry did afer Udet´s suicide was down to him. Whether he could have done it without Goering´s protection is doubtful. His father was Jewish.