Pilots used Google to land on around the world record
PILOTS who flew around the world in a Spitfire have revealed that they used Google to find places to land in remote locations on their extraordinary journey.
Matt Jones and co-pilot Steve Brooks took a silver Mark IX Supermarine Spitfire across the globe over four months.
Covering 27,000 miles, they touched down in 91 landing stages across 30 countries in 2019. The journey set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest circumnavigation achieved by a single-seat, single-engine piston aircraft.
The Silver Spitfire’s route in a mission Jones and his team named The Longest Flight went across Europe, Asia, North America and back to its starting point in the United Kingdom.
Looking back on the record-breaking flight he made with Brooks, Jones recalled worrying about running out of fuel when he was flying across Russia,
‘All the Russian airports were 1,000 miles apart. I thought we’ve extended the fuel as much as we can’
and having to find places to land. He said: “I looked at the Russian legs, and all the airports were more than 1,000 miles apart. I thought, ‘We’ve extended the fuel as much as we can. We’re not going to be able to join those dots up. We’re going to run out of fuel before we get there.’ So I would use Google, and on four occasions I found a runway.”
He added: “I gave those pictures, a dot on Google Maps, to our Russian interpreter and said ‘Can we land here? Do you know if this is still a viable runway?’ He managed to find out a little bit about them and get us permission to land.” Jones finished at Goodwood Aerodrome, the headquarters of Boultbee Flight Academy in West Sussex.
Filmmaker Benjamin Uttley has directed a feature-length documentary about the team’s journey. Silver Spitfire:
The Longest Flight premieres on Sky History tonight at 9pm.