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An airports system for United Kingdom air services

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

Peter Masefield
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Extract

Forty years ago Flight Lieutenant John Nelson Boothman, AFC, RAF, won the Schneider Trophy outright for the Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom, flying a Vickers-Supermarine S-6B (S.I595) on Sunday 13th September 1931. “The better the day the better the deed.”

To some, that win at 340.8 mph over a 270 mile course seemed the end of an era and the climax of the careers of both Reginald Mitchell, and of Henry Royce, the designers of the S-6B and of its 2300 bhp Rolls-Royce “R” engine.

In the event, as history has unfolded, the winning of the Schneider Trophy was but the opening page of a more significant story—the evolution of Mitchell's Spitfire, of Camm's Hurricane and of their Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Those later Schneider Contests—from 1927 to 1931—led directly to the winning of the Battle of Britain in 1940—and to our presence here in a free world tonight.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Aeronautical Journal , Volume 76 , Issue 737 , May 1972 , pp. 275 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1972 

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References

The 19th Mitchell Memorial Lecture given to the Southampton Branch of the Society on 12th November 1971.