Cobra Daytona Coupe CSX2286

[Harpoon PV2]

Originally Posted by Daytona Dek

The Spitfire in the foreground (OU-V) is an ex Battle of Britain Spitfire and flew 176 combat missions. Post war it was converted to a 2 seater training aircraft. It is now based at Sywell airport a few miles from me and I see it regularly overhead giving paid passenger flights. It has been involved in a number of accidents two of which were local. The most recent was in May of this year when it crash landed due to pilot error. The Air Accident Investigation Board showed the. pilot held a commercial licence with 23,000 hours but only 90 on the Spitfire. He had failed to switch back from the fuselage tank (used for take off and landing only) to the wing tanks during a previous flight and drained it. Consequently when he prepared for landing and switched from the wing tanks to the fuselage it suffered from an air lock and fuel starvation. Fortunately there is private airfield close to Sywell at Pitsford which he was able to attempt an emergency landing. Unfortunately he landed too far down the strip and ran into the hedge damaging the nose and one wing.
As an aside Sywell airport has a small hotel and pub garden and is a great place to take the Cobra to enjoy a pint whilst watching the Ultimate Warbirds collection (Spitfire, Mustang, Thunderbolt and Me109) at close quarters take off and land.

It's not the 90 hrs, in type that got him, it's the 23,000 arrogant hours that got him! At the height of BOB, pilots had as little as five hours in the Spit, and they didn't do such a rookie mistake! Cheers, Dennis