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Re: Spitfire repair and damage categories

Posted by PeterA on Mon Oct 14, 2002 06:01:02 AM

In reply top Re: Were spitfire airframes so delicate? (or expendable?) posted by Joe Scheil on Sun Oct 13, 2002 03:31:40 PM

Jagan & Joe,
The repair and damage categories of Spitfires is quite a complex subject. There is a comprehensive explanation on page 617 of ?Spitfire the History? by Morgan/Shacklady.
A cat.E write off is a ?write off? and the aircraft will not fly again. There are sub divisions of cat.E which will determine if the aircraft is a total loss due to Accident or Battle damage, can be reduced to spares or become a ?Ground Instructional? airframe.
It takes more than a ?normal? undercarriage collapse, ground loop or wheels up landing for for a Spitfire to be cat.E. There are a range of repair schedules in the Air Publications to repair such damage at, Unit User site, Maintenance Unit site or Repaired in Works site, depending on severity. Yes the Spitfire was a little on the delicate side of the median but for a 1930?s interceptor design, a narrow undercarriage, like the Me109, was a price worth paying for light weight and a thin wing.
In my view it is most unlikely that recovered major assemblies were, as policy, ever used on the main Vickers CBAF or Supermarine production lines. It would be far too complex to manage and risky. In reality there is not too much interchangeability of major assemblies between marks of Spitfire and even within marks there is a whole host of expanding ?Modification States? to contend with. The Civilian Repair Organisation was set up to deal with these very valuable assets. For Spitfires, about forty supplier companies would rebuild and repair assemblies and components to feed them back into the Maintenance Units and the like of No 1 Civilian Repair Unit at Morris Motors Cowley. Here aircraft would be repaired or even reconstructed using, in the main, recovered materials and returned them to service.
In India there were six Civilian Repair Organisations operating during WWII.
PeterA

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