The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
Chocks away…
Simon de Burton salutes the skies as he watches a very special Spitfire – call sign G-IRTY – head off on a record-breaking adventure of a lifetime
As you read this, sunlight should be glinting off the wingtips of a highly polished Spitfire fighter as it crosses the skies somewhere over Asia on the way to making aviation history. The Telegraphsponsored ‘Longest Flight’ is a remarkable attempt by British pilots Steve Boultbee Brooks and Matt Jones to fly the 76-year-old aircraft on a four-month, 27,000-mile odyssey around the world and straight into the record books.
The Silver Spitfire – named after the appearance of its unpainted aluminium skin – was delivered from Supermarine’s Castle Bromwich factory in 1943, before serving with RAF squadrons based in locations including Detling in Kent and Ford in Sussex, where it suffered damage from a wheels-up landing in May 1944.
Once repaired, the MJ271 fighter aircraft ended up in the Netherlands with the Canadian pilots of 401 Squadron with whom it carried out dive bombing raids before being declared “over-stressed” in December 1944. At this point, the Spitfire was removed from active service.
For more than 70 years it was kept mothballed by the Royal Netherlands Air Force before being taken over by Boultbee Brooks, a property developer, explorer and record-breaking pilot, and finding a new home at the Goodwood-based Boultbee Flight Academy, which he co-founded along with Jones in 2009.
After a meticulous rebuild at the start of this year, the Silver Spitfire – call sign G-IRTY – took off from Goodwood on 5 August, following an evocative fly-past by other wartime fighters. Its first stop was at RAF Lossiemouth in north-east Scotland, since when the plane has travelled to its current location via the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, New Jersey, LA, Japan and Taiwan. In total, it will land around 100 times and visit up to 30 countries before returning to Goodwood in December.
To help with the fact that the pilots will cross into 24 different time zones during the journey, co-sponsor IWC has supplied both of them with special versions of its ingenious Pilot’s Watch Timezoner Chronograph.
The unique “Timezoner” mechanism enables the hands to be instantly adjusted to show the correct time in any of the 24 different zones by pressing down and turning the engraved bezel so that the relevant city name is at the 12 o’clock position – during which the watch keeps running with no loss of accuracy.
In 2015, IWC acquired the rights to the basic mechanism from its inventor Mike Vogt, who introduced it through his own
The Silver Spitfire took off from Goodwood on 5 August, following an evocative fly-past by other wartime fighters
Vogard watch brand. Stefan Ihnen, associate director of research and development at IWC, says his company spent more than three years refining and modifying the system to make it easier to operate, as well as more reliable.
“The original design used an external lever that had to be opened in order to move the bezel,” explains Ihnen. “We have done away with that by making it possible to unlock the bezel by simply pushing down on it, a system that IWC invented when it was making watches for Porsche design during the 1980s. We also incorporated engineering from our Aquatimer dive watches to improve the interface between the bezel and the mechanism.”
Boultbee Brooks and Jones are both equipped with examples of the 250-piece ‘Longest Flight’ special edition of the watch, which will be used extensively throughout the journey, according to Jones.
“Being able to keep track of time all around the world simply by turning the bezel of the watch means we can keep focused on flying the aircraft with minimal distraction,” he explained. “We’ll cross six or seven time zones while passing over Asia, so being able to quickly co-ordinate with the people on the ground at the next destination is really useful. Best of all, the watch will ensure I don’t unwittingly call home in the middle of the night and wake up the family.”
IWC Pilot’s Watch Timezoner Chronograph, £11,250; iwc.com. To follow the progress of the Silver Spitfire, visit silverspitfire.com