[Phantom Phan1200]

I thought the only spitfire that had a two bladed prop was the prototype.
But I was watching Firepower on the Military & the topic was the RAF, they were talking about the BOB & showed a short clip of pilots scrambling to two bladed spits on the ramp.
The clip was short & in black & white but they were no doubt spits in what looked like BOB era markings & camo.
Were there early two bladed Spits variants that flew in combat or was I seeing things???

[STARMAN 352ND]

This link might help you.
JP

The Supermarine Spitfire

[jim]

To the best of my knowledge only a very small number of Spitfires with 2 blade wooden props fought in the BoB and that was only in the very early stage of the battle.
Certainly in France there was a few 2 bladers but on their return along with all those in the UK they were changed to 3 blade constant pitch props .


btw , the comments about the stiff ailerons is interesting, I would like to make the point that this problem only appeared at speeds above 360 usually in a dive.
If the pilot dived the aircraft at speeds reaching 400 serious muscle power was needed to pull up.
Each new Sptfire was tested in a dive up to 470 mph but only by the test pilots at the factory.
Rooky pilots would have just carried on straight into the ground.

Supermarine was well aware of this problem and worked very hard to find the answer.
Although the Spit was made on a production line it was found that on testing each plane for the first time that the ailerons nearly always needed balancing to get the plane to fly level.
The reason for this was the fact that each wing was very slightly different in manufacture from from the next one and this applied to the ailerons too.


This was easily fixed at the factory test field but once the plane was issued to squadrons and had been repaired and or serviced a few times it was found that ground crews didnt check this particular part of the aircraft.
This often resulted in many Spitfires being unbalanced in flight and flying one wing down, this lead onto some planes being branded as rogues.
The problem was identified and the ground crews were given extra instruction in this area.

However work continued at Supermarine and all metal ailerons were fitted which did help lighten the ailerons at high speeds, (it was found that the fabric ones deformed at high speed) every aileron on every Spitfire had to be checked after servicing.
This very same problem was encountered by the Me109. indeed several British pilots that had flown captured 109s said the problem was even more severe on the German plane and if they had known about this they would not have worried so much when in combat against it.

To quote Jeffrey Quill, if I had flown the 109 earlier I would have treated it with less respect in combat.
This opinion was backed up by Alex Henshaw (Supermarine test pilot) after he had flown the 109.

Another interesting point was that at speeds up to 360 the Curtis Hawk outperformed both the Spit Hurri and the BF109 with its superior aileron control.

[Captain Eddie]

Interesting info on the Spit, Jim, thanks for sharing it.