Spitfire, the people’s plane.

[Flightrite]

If the Spitfire was built like all other British products - you could guarantee that every component would be totally inaccessible, and require 6 other components to be removed, to get at the one you needed to work on!!

Haha probably true! In another life I cut my teeth on Pommy junk cars, the Pomms where obviously drunk on Guinness when they designed a lot of their working machinery! The DH104's I used to drive where an ergonomic disaster!?

[Geoff_H]

Haha probably true! In another life I cut my teeth on Pommy junk cars, the Pomms where obviously drunk on Guinness when they designed a lot of their working machinery! The DH104's I used to drive where an ergonomic disaster!?

A joke told the meat by an American:

What do you call a person who owns an English car with a Lucas electrical system?

A pedestrian.

[Bruce Tuncks]

I have heard that the Spitfire nearly LOST the war. It cost 3 times as much as an FW 190 for similar performance. But gosh it looked good so who cares about costs and benefits?

[Old Koreelah]

... The B-17 and Lancaster are in the same stable as the Spitfire. Both the British and American air forces had other bombers which did as much work as the B-17 and Lancaster, but both of these got the media attention.

I suspect a major factor is which aircraft were available postwar for filming war movies and TV series.

There were plenty of B-17s and Lancasters, while B-24s and others were scrapped in vast numbers.

Most of us Boomers grew up never seeing Liberators, Sunderlands, Halifaxes, Stirlings, etc.

Even Jimmy Shtewart appears in 12 O'Clock High in a B-17, even though he flew Liberators during the war.

Edited July 15, 2020 by Old Koreelah