I didn’t think the loop was that bad. It was my first time at the controls of a Spitfire MK VIII and naturally I had to try it. I’d looped both a Mustang and a P-40 before, so the Spit should be easy.
On top of the loop I throttled back the Merlin, then pulled back on the control ring as we headed earthward inverted. I pulled even harder as the ground got bigger in the windscreen, but it soon became apparent that I’d overdone it, and pulled her into a high-speed stall. Rookie mistake.
The Spit began flicking left and right like a drunken seesaw and stopped responding to my frantic, panicked over-controlling. I was a passenger, powerless to avoid catastrophe.
Now the ground was so big there was no way out of this mess. Seconds later I drilled a very large hole in the earth as the Spitfire ploughed into the ground at over 200 mph. It’s called “augering in”, which is a very good description for what I did.
Worst of all, it was embarrassing in front of the simulator operator.
Going sim
My misadventure manifested in one of three WWII fighter simulators installed at the Temora Aviation Museum (TAM), the home of the real things. I had been invited to fly each one of the Spitfire, Mustang and Kittyhawk Redbird MX2 motion simulators and managed to make a complete galah of myself in each one.
TAM commissioned the sims in December last year,
