PLeonardo da Vinci's drawing of a flapping wing
© TopFoto.co.uk / © Collection Roger-Viollet

1. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, one Spitfire pilot had a grandstand view of the invasion – shot down over the Channel on June 5, he wasn’t picked up from his dinghy until the next day.

2. Early pilots were unfamiliar with the plane’s retractable undercarriage and many early accidents were caused by them forgetting to lower the Spitfire’s wheels.

3. This versatile little plane had some unusual roles. Sometimes under-wing mountings were modified to carry a pair of small beer barrels in place of the bombs. These aircraft, returning to the Continent from England, were warmly greeted!

4. The Spitfire was the only British plane in continuous construction throughout the second world war.

5. In the early 1960s, aircraft company Vickers/Supermarine wanted to use the name Vanguard (a car made by Standard-Triumph) for one of its passenger aircraft. In exchange they allowed Standard-Triumph to use the name of one of their aircraft for its cars – and the Spitfire sports car was born.

6. German pilots had a great deal more respect for Spitfires than Hurricanes. The standard wisecrack among Luftwaffe fighter pilots was that the Hurricane was “a nice little plane to shoot down”. However, this could have been because no German fighter pilot wanted to admit being attacked by a fighter plane made of fabric and wood, as the Hurricane largely was.

7. Due to the lack of Hurricanes in flying condition when the 1969 film The Battle Of Britain was made, most of the air-to-air combat scenes use the Spitfire.

8. After winning the Battle of Britain, two No 66 Squadron Spitfires flew the Fighter Command’s first patrol over France since its fall on December 20, 1940. Such operations by pairs of fighters were known as “rhubarbs”.

9. The Spitfires, Hurricanes, Messerschmitts and Heinkels used in The Battle Of Britain were so well camouflaged they were invisible against the ground or sky! Most of the aerial scenes therefore had to be filmed with clouds in the background, so they could be seen.

10. On September 15, 1940, during the Battle of Britain, pilot Sergeant Raymond Holmes spotted a German bomber heading for central London. Having run out of ammunition, he rammed it and a large section came down over Victoria train station. Holmes bailed out safely, and lived to see the incident not only immortalised in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain (when a Spitfire was used instead of Holmes’s Hurricane) but to see the remains of the German plane unearthed during renovations at Victoria in 2003. He also witnessed archaeologists unearthing parts of his own plane in Buckingham Palace Road for a Channel 5 documentary – 64 years on, the control column was still set to “fire”. Holmes died, aged 90, in June 2005.