FLYING A LEGEND
Michael Baer's Spitfire Experience by Michael Baer
FLYING A LEGEND
"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings...”
S
o goes the opening lines in a very wellknown poem by John Gillespie Magee Jr, a young RCAF pilot who was killed in 1941, shortly after the writing of “High Flight”. When I was a twelve-year old, the entirety of the poem was cut-out from some magazine or other and taped to my wall, in a bedroom whose ceiling bristled with all the airplane models I had built, suspended by thread in battle action settings. The cut-out featured an image of my most revered and coveted fighter plane, a Supermarine Spitfire, climbing vertically to join the “tumbling mirth”. To do such a thing was only a dream, and I could not possibly have imagined then that nearly fifty years later, I would climb into the back seat of the most famous fighter plane ever built to wheel and soar and swing through those “footless halls of air”. I no idea that such a thing was possible for mere mortals, until my brother-in-law dropped an innocent comment one day, informing me that there existed in England two-seater Spitfire trainers in which I could fly. It took me a nano-second to determine that I would do this on
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my sixtieth birthday, at that time two years away. As it turned out - fortuitously so, given the advent of the Covid pandemic and the cessation of pretty much everything - I Just. Could. Not. Wait. And so in June of 2019, my wife and I travelled to England. Within our itinerary was only one item for me, really, and that was a trip out to the Heritage Hangar at Biggin Hill, south of London. Biggin Hill was an extremely important front-line fighter base during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, with fighters rising daily to meet the bomber streams heading to London, just to the north. Today, what were grass strips are asphalt, and the airfield is home to F1 racing, with cars shipped around the world by very large air transports. However, on this day it was just me and Jeremy the pilot, strapped into MJ627, ready to take off. This Spitfire was more
than a trainer. It was a combat veteran, seeing action in 1944 with a Canadian squadron and, in fact, shot down an enemy fighter over Holland only two days into its service life. After the war it was converted into a Trainer, which meant that as I strapped into my parachute and harness in the very narrow confines of the rear seat, I had a set of duplicate controls, and could watch them move as Jeremy flew. I had briefly wondered if I would suffer some sort of claustrophobia or something when climbing into this very narrow space and having a bubble canopy closed over my head. Far from it. I knew I had the option to call the whole thing off and be refunded, right up until the start of the engine, but when that Rolls Royce Merlin coughed to life and the airframe shuddered, a thin cloud of exhaust blew back over my canopy and I could smell
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