| Notes |
- Daily Telegraph Obituaries, February 21, 1996.
JEFFERY KINDERSLEY QUILL . 1913 -- 1996
JEFFREY QUILL who has died at the age of 83, was a great test pilot who
earned the title "Mr. Spitfire".
Not only did he prepare the celebrated fighter for service, but,
remarkably for a test pilot, saw action as a fighter pilot during the
Battle of Britain. He shot down two enemy aircraft before returning to
his own hazardous speciality.
It was in 1936 that Matt Summers, then Vickers chief test pilot, first
flew the Spitfire. Quill, his assistant, was the second pilot to fly it.
Quill and his team put through their paces some 52 operational variants
of a production total of 27,500 Spitfires.
Through hours of painstaking test-flying he helped the Spitfire -- and
many other airplanes -- to perform as their designers had hoped they
would.
In Quill's day, designers could not call upon computers or large wind
tunnels to help them get it right, nor could test pilots use flight
simulators; so he risked his life as soon as he took prototypes off the
ground for the first time.
By the summer of 1940 and the Battle of Britain, Quill had turned R. J.
Mitchell's concept into an integrated fighting machine.
True, the sturdier Hurricane (designed by Hawker's Sydney Camm) far
outnumbered the speedier Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. But Quill
had brought the Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire to the point where it could
tackle enemy Me109 escorting fighters while Hurricanes took on the
bombers.
As the fighting swayed across the south of England, Quill ached to join
in. There was no problem about his qualifications. He had served as an
RAF fighter pilot in the early 1930s. He feared, however, that the
application to join a squadron would be opposed because of his unique
value as a test pilot.
To meet this objection, he persuaded Vickers that he could do little
more for the Spitfire without gaining first hand experience of combat,
or "a spot of practical" as he put it. After some string pulling, the
RAF went along with the scheme, and on August 5, 1940, he was posted to
No. 65 squadron at Hornchurch.
But, after he had shot down an Me109 and a Heinkel 111 bomber, he was
told to put his flying officer's uniform back in mothballs and return to
the Supermarine works at Southampton.
As a result of his experience, a number of production changes were
swiftly introduced. Vitally, aileron control at high speed was improved.
Combat had also taught Quill that pilots were getting shot down by an
enemy they could not see. The optical qualities of the windscreen side
panels were defective; worse, the rear fuselage and the canopy impeded
rear vision. After his report, the design was changed.
Quill was an exceptionally articulate test pilot, and he gained a
reputation as an outstanding troubleshooter. This helped him secure a
second spell of Service flying when, in 1943, the Admiralty was
confronted by problems with aircraft carrier operations.
He was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the air branch of the
RNVR, and so escaped from the works for another five months.
The Sea Spitfire, or Seafire as the Fleet Air Arm variant became known,
was available from 1941, but ran into difficulties, particularly when
operating from escort carriers whose decks were 30 per cent shorter than
those of the big fleet carriers.
Quill undertook innumerable deck landings which suggested was to modify
future production of Seafires and the training of their pilots. He
enjoyed the Navy and was saddened when told to change out of uniform for
the second time.
Jeffrey Kindersley Quill was born on Feb 1, 1913. When he was five, an
airplane landed and another crashed on the common between his Sussex
home at Littlehampton and the sea. He always said that these events
determined him to fly.
In 1931 he entered the RAF from Lancing College on a short service
commission, being unable to afford a cadetship at the RAF college
Cranwell because of the death of his father.
He went solo on an Avro Tutor after five hours' dual instruction. The
next year he passed out with the rating "exceptional" and was posted to
No. 17, a fighter squadron stationed at Upavon, equipped with Bristol
Bulldogs.
Later he would reflect ruefully on what he saw as a scandal; that, seven
years before the outbreak of the 1939-45 war, RAF fighters were little
more than derivatives of RFC machines of the 1914-18 war.
At the end of 1933, Quill was posted to the Meteorological Flight at
Duxford near Cambridge. He welcomed the challenge and occupational
hazard of flying obsolescent Siskins in all weathers. He accomplished the
astonishing feat of completing a year, irrespective of normally
unflyable conditions, without missing one Met Flight daily climb. He was
awarded the AFC. Late in 1935, he was tipped off that Mutt Summers, the
Vickers chief test pilot, was looking for a young assistant. He was
disinclined at first to pass up the possibility of a permanent
commission, but was persuaded to fly down to Brooklands for interviews
by Summers and Sir Robert McLean, the chairman of Vickers Aviation.
He accepted the post at ?500 per year. The RAF released him, and from
Jan 1, 1936 he became busily employed testing aircraft produced by
Vickers and it's subsidiary, Supermarine.
These include the Vildebeest torpedo-bomber, Valentia transport and a
prototype Venom fighter (eventually abandoned in favour of the Spitfire,
which performed better).
Mutt Summers first flew "The Fighter", as the prototype K5054 was known
in the works, on March 6, 1936. On March 26 he invited Quill to take her
up.
The more Quill flew her, the more convinced he became, as he was to
recall, "this airplane was of immense importance". On June 18 that year,
a recurring fear that he might crash the one and only Spitfire was
almost realised on the day it was unveiled to the press.
At the last minute, it was found to have an untraceable engine oil leak.
To fly or not to fly? Mitchell settled the matter. Tersely he told
Quill: "Get in and fly it".
He was just airborne when, to his horror, he saw the oil pressure
gauge drop to zero. There was no alternative but to climb sufficiently
to turn, and land despite the very high risk of engine seizure and a
crash.
The fault was traced, a new Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was substituted
and the Spitfire survived what might have been curtains.
Shortly after this accident, the RAF sought to attract Quill back with
the offer of a permanent commission. He had hardly turned it down after
"much heart aching" when his life was imperilled again.
He was giving a Wellesley geodetic bomber it's production test when at
12,000 ft, the single-engined monoplane lurched into a right handed spin
and failed to respond to normal recovery action. At 3,000 ft he baled
out.
After this escape, he was more certain than ever that his destiny lay
entirely with the Spitfire and he moved from Vickers at Weybridge to
Supermarine.
With the outbreak of war and the demand for more and more ever-improving
Spitfires during and after the Battle of Britain, Quill was sorely
stretched.
Yet from time to time there were moments of welcome relief as when, in
the summer of 1940, Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister for Aircraft
Production, who had invited him to dinner, failed to join Quill and his
fellow guests.
At the cigar stage, the Beaver was discovered slumped in sleep over his
desk in an adjoining room. The press baron was as much a casualty of the
hour as were the fatigued fighter pilots for whom he was driving on
fighter production.
There was also the bizarre plot -- Operation Airthief -- hatched by
Captain Philip Pinkney of 12 commando to paddle Quill ashore near a
German airfield in France with the aim of stealing an Fw190 fighter
about which details were urgently required.
Quill mugged up every available piece of intelligence about the new
fighter. He had also undergone a strenuous commando fitness and Folbot
canoe paddling regime before the exploit was called off. The surrender
at Pembrey in Wales by Oberleutenant Arnim Faber of a pristine Fw190 had
made such a perilous exploit unnecessary.
The end of the war brought Quill, now Supermarine's senior test pilot,
no respite. The jet age had arrived and with it an experimental
Supermarine design, the E.10/44, or Spiteful. Quill was climbing it on a
June day in 1947 when he lost consciousness at about 40,000 ft. Coming
to at 10,000 ft he landed safely but medical checks revealed the toll 16
years of hard flying had taken.
Three months' leave failed to restore his health fully. He had to accept
that he wound never test high-performance fighters again -- though 30
years after his first flight in Mitchell's prototype, he flew a Spitfire
for the last time in 1966.
"Flying a desk" did not come easily, but he made a great success of it
with Vickers-Armstrong, the British Aircraft Corporation and as a
director of Sepecat, the company which administered the Jaguar
programme.
He served also as marketing director of Panavia, the
Anglo-German-Italian consortium which developed the Tornado multi-role
combat aircraft.
In Munich on this programme, he shared an office with Willi
Messerschmitt, creator of the Me109, opponent of the Spitfire in the
Battle of Britain.
Quill retired in 1978. In 1983 he published 'Spitfire. A Test Pilot's
Story'.
Quill was awarded the AFC in 1936, appointed OBE in 1942 and elected
fellow of the Royal Aeronautic Society in 1980.
|
1913 - 1996 (82 years)
[2] 