R.J. Mitchell, David Niven and the Haunted Flight of the Silver Spitfire

 

David Niven would have loved the idea: a round-the-world journey in a Silver Spitfire.

 

Niven, Spitfire test pilot in The First of the Few, and the original round the world explorer, taking to the skies in a hot air balloon as Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s classic tale. Eerily enough, the spectre of a hot air balloon appeared in the sky on the day of Niven’s funeral service in a small village in Switzerland, as if waiting to carry away his very soul.

 

Niven of the Dawn Patrol, playing an aviator yet again with his close friend Errol Flynn, portraying First World War flyers facing almost certain death in their flimsy bi-plans, in constructions that had never seemed so vulnerable. A man who in real-life served in the Second Wold War (Sandhurst graduate and a member of a Phantom reconnaissance team and therefore a ghost soldier, a specialist in covert operations). A man who must have seen Spitfires plying their deadly trade in the skies of Europe.

 

No one can say whether David Niven met R.J.Mitchell in person, though he was good friends with Leslie Howard who played the aircraft designer on screen. And it was Howard who, exchanging make believe wings for the real thing, would die in controversial circumstances in 1943, shot down by the Luftwaffe while on a DC-3 flight from Lisbon to Bristol.  

 

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Before they took on the livery of combat colours (the greens and browns of the earth rather than the lighter tones of the sky) the first Spitfire prototypes, and the Supermarine sea planes that won the Schneider Trophy, wore the same silver hues as their distinguished descendant, the one now flying into the history books. Like that of the Hawker Hurricane, the lineage is impeccable.  

 

Circumnavigation has a glamorous ring to it, speaking at it does of journeys which push the limits of the human spirit and imagination: mariner’s journeys made by sail and aviator’s journeys made on the wing. And yet more ambitious voyages. It is a little over fifty years since the first circumnavigation of the Moon carried out by Apollo 8, the same crew which took the famous Earthrise picture. It is more than conceivable that the pilots of the Silver Spitfire will see the curve of the Earth as they travel above its surface, its distant siren-like horizons beckoning them on. Just as Phileas Fogg would have seen the same views from the elevated gondola of his hot air balloon.

 

As the Spitfire flies through the skies of England and France (and over the terrain of many other European countries), the air will be full of revenants from the Second World War, particularly Sydney Camm’s most famous creation: the redoubtable Hawker Hurricane that fought alongside its more illustrious cousin for so long and with such distinction. The presence of the Silver Spitfire, originally built in 1943, may summon phantoms of the planes it flew alongside over seven decades ago, the spectral host like an airborne armada reminiscent of the one that invaded the continent on D Day.       

 

And almost certainly the Silver Spitfire will be accompanied on its travels by the ghost of the man who made the flight of every Spitfire possible, by the spirit of R.J. Mitchell. And maybe, just maybe, by the ghost of David Niven.

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