I am currently reading "Spitfire: A Test Pilot's Story" by Jeffrey Quill. I am used to reading "There I was ..." accounts of pilots but this one is not like that at all - very open and honest personal account of test flying the Spitfire. On page 108 I found the most fascinating test description I can ever remember reading. Flush riveting was used on the prototype Spitfire K5054 for the smoothest possible surfaces but at that time it was considered difficult, expensive and time consuming in production. So they went to a local grocery and bought several bags of dried split peas and glued them on every flush rivet head for an objective test of the benefit over round head rivets. The speed was reduced around 22 mph. That would have been a satisfactory conclusion of the testing in most organizations but not this one. They progressively scraped off the split peas to determine which flush rivets were beneficial and which ones were not and the results were applied to production airplanes.
Bob Axsom
Bob Axsom
Last edited: