Bonhams Scrambles Spitfire to Altitude of £1.5m

LONDON -- Bonhams will sell an airworthy two-seater Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire aircraft, estimated value £1.5 million, on April 20 at the RAF Museum, Hendon, London.

This will be the second of the iconic World War Two Spitfires which Bonhams has offered within just seven months. Last September the auction house sold a non-airworthy 1945 Supermarine Spitfire for a record price of over $3 million NZ (£1.1 million Sterling). This was a Bubble Canopy MK XVI, considered by collectors as being less desirable.

The company is now selling the first two-seater Spitfire to be offered at public auction for more than twenty years. Painstakingly restored to airworthiness during a five-year period, Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire TR Mark IX is civilian-registered "G-ILDA."

Today, this Spitfire is being offered as a freshly-completed "zero-hours" ground-up restoration to perfect two-seat TR Mark IX specification; in effect an historic warbird absolutely ready-to-fly and in truly sparkling flightline condition. Originally it was a single-seat Mark IX but it now offers a new owner the attractive extra accommodation and flexibility of the two-seat trainer variant.

The Supermarine-designed aircraft was built originally by the British Vickers-Armstrong company in 1944. It was delivered to the Royal Air Force’s No 33 Maintenance Unit at Lyneham in Wiltshire where it was to be prepared to operational standard for service delivery. Its original serial number was "SM520."

This magnificent and charismatic aircraft was subsequently sold in 1948 to the South African Air Force in whose service its operational history presently remains unknown. Many years later, in the 1970s, it was rediscovered in a Cape Town scrap yard from which it was rescued by the late building developer and aviation enthusiast Charles Church, who initiated the inevitably long process of restoration. Old "SM 520" was then sold in 1989 to Alan Dunkerley, who eventually resold it to the late Paul Portelli in June 2002.

Portelli then commissioned Classic Aero Engineering to restore the machine to its as-original TR Mark IX two-seat trainer specification. As work progressed upon the historic airframe at CAE’s Thruxton facility in Hampshire, the mighty, supercharged V12 Rolls-Royce Merlin 266 engine was overhauled and returned to airworthy standard by the specialist Retro Track & Air concern at Dursley, Gloucestershire, and fitted with a four-blade Hoffman propeller.

When the Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire family of single-seat fighter aircraft initially entered service in 1938, the Mark I model was an extremely sophisticated, blindingly fast and supremely powerful eight-gun weapon of war. Training pilots were expected to make the transition from humble training aircraft to this new thoroughbred, and the gulf between the two proved huge. A two-seat training version of the Battle of Britain Spitfire was first considered in 1941, but barely a handful of local service conversions were made before 1946. A post-war batch of 20 Mark IX airframes were then converted into two-seat form as the Type 509 model, for supply most notably to the Indian and Irish air forces. The forward cockpit was moved forward 13 1/2-inches and a second cockpit was inserted behind it, slightly raised to give its occupant improved forward vision.