Vintage fighter comes within moments of tipping over completely before flopping back down in incident at Pitsford Airfield
Gareth Corfield
Transport Correspondent
10 October 2024 5:26pm BST
Telegraph.co.uk
A two-seat Spitfire tipped onto its nose in a crash-landing after its “distracted” pilot turned on an empty fuel tank by mistake, accident investigators said.
The vintage fighter, which saw combat in the Second World War before being converted into a two-seater for pleasure flights, suffered a damaged propeller and wing in the May 6 incident at Northamptonshire’s Pitsford Airfield.
Neither the pilot nor the passenger was injured when the aircraft, known by its former RAF serial number ML407, came within moments of tipping over completely before flopping back down.
The Spitfire’s 62-year-old pilot, who was not identified in Thursday’s report, had become “distracted” and selected an empty fuel tank instead of a full one while preparing to land, investigators said.
The pilot had to carry out a forced landing at Pitsford, which is three and a half miles from Sywell Aerodrome where the Spitfire was supposed to land after its Rolls-Royce Merlin engine stopped unexpectedly from lack of fuel.
“The loss of engine power was attributed to fuel starvation due to depletion of fuel in the fuselage tank supplying the engine,” said the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), which added that the pilot “did not transfer the supply to the wing tanks after take-off”.
Video footage of the accident shows the Spitfire rolling down Pitsford’s grass runway towards a hedgerow before veering to the right and tipping onto its nose and port wing before crashing back to the ground in an upright position.
The aircraft, which is operated by Ultimate Warbird Flights for pleasure flights carrying members of the public, was back flying again within a month of the accident, public aircraft tracking data shows.
Describing the accident, AAIB investigators said the pilot had inadvertently emptied the Spitfire’s main fuel tank because he had become distracted during a previous flight and forgotten to change tanks at the right time.
An airlock developed which meant the 60 gallons of petrol in the wing tanks would not feed into the aircraft’s Rolls-Royce Merlin 25 engine.
“Approximately 30 seconds after changing to the fuselage tank, the engine ‘surged’ and ran down,” said the investigators.
“The pilot re-selected the wing tanks and attempted to induce flow into the engine by yawing the aircraft, however, he was unable to re-start the engine.”
Investigators said that the Spitfire was on its third flight of the day when it made its forced landing, the first having been a training sortie “with the accident pilot in the rear seat”.
After that first flight, the accident pilot – an airline pilot with 23,000 hours in his logbook, of which 90 hours were on Spitfires – took over ML407’s front seat for a flight with a “friend of the owner” as the passenger.
During that second flight, the pilot said he “may have been distracted and after take-off failed to transfer the fuel supply to the wing tanks”.
As part of its conversion into a two-seater, ML407 had been fitted with wing tanks in addition to the Spitfire’s normal main fuel tank behind the engine.
Normal procedure was to use the main fuel tank for take-off and landing and the wing tanks for other flying.