Spitfire cockpit experience prize winner
Header image: Club member Mark Broughton, winner of the Spitfire cockpit experience ballot prize for February 2018, in the cockpit of BBMF Spitfire Mk LF XIe MK356 on 11 May. (Photo: Clive Rowley)
Club member Mark Broughton was the lucky winner of the RAF Memorial Flight Official Club ballot prize for February 2018, the chance to experience the cockpit of one of the BBMF Spitfires. Mark, from Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, arranged to visit the BBMF at RAF Coningsby on 11th May to claim his prize. He brought with him his wife Claire and guests Michael and Marilyn Holland.
Mark was able to sit in the cockpit of BBMF Spitfire Mk LF IXe MK356, a wartime veteran Spitfire that flew 60 operations in 60 days in 1944 during the build-up to D-Day and beyond, and who’s Canadian pilot Gordon Ockenden claimed a shared kill in her against a German Bf109 fighter over the Normandy Beachhead on D-Day+1. Mark was able to sit in the same pilot’s seat, handle the controls and thumb the same gun firing button in this genuine wartime Spitfire. (MK356 is now painted in a desert camouflage scheme.)
The BBMF host was Squadron Leader (retired) Clive Rowley, a former fighter pilot and Officer Commanding the BBMF who flew MK356 on many occasions during his 11 years with the Flight. He explained the controls and the clutter of instrumentation and switches inside the cockpit, which Michael Holland described as “busy” when he took a look inside. Clive explained the difficulties of taxying, taking off and landing the Spitfire with the restricted forward view created by the long upward-sloping nose of the aircraft, which Mark was fully able to appreciate sitting in the cockpit. Clive also described what it was like to fly the Spitfire.
Mark, a man of few words, described the experience as “Fantastic” and when asked how he thought it might have felt to the pilots who flew the Spitfire in wartime he simply said, “Scary”!
To round things off, Mark and his guests were also given a personal tour of the BBMF hangar, being allowed up close to the Flight’s other aircraft.
