The Racing Aircraft That Gave Us The Spitfire | Supermarine Schneiders

Today we look at the legendary Supermarine racing aircraft from the Scheider Cup Races.

- Limited Edition X4009 Spitfire Watches-

Recommended Reading:

0:00 Intro
3:37 Pre-1925 Efforts
7:47 Supermarine S.4
10:55 Supermarine S.5
16:57 Supermarine S.6
24:01 Supermarine S.6b

[RexsHangar]

F.A.Q Section

Q: Do you take aircraft requests?
A: I have a list of aircraft I plan to cover, but feel free to add to it with suggestions:)

Q: Why do you use imperial measurements for some videos, and metric for others?
A: I do this based on country of manufacture. Imperial measurements for Britain and the U.S, metric for the rest of the world, but I include text in my videos that convert it for both.

Q: Will you include video footage in your videos, or just photos?
A: Video footage is very expensive to licence, if I can find footage in the public domain I will try to use it, but a lot of it is hoarded by licencing studies (British Pathe, Periscope films etc). In the future I may be able to afford clips :)

Q: Why do you sometimes feature images/screenshots from flight simulators?
A: Sometimes there are not a lot of photos available for certain aircraft, so I substitute this with digital images that are as accurate as possible.

[BretHiggins]

My Great great (great?) Uncle won the 1929 Schneider Trophy in an S6B, earning the AFC. Unfortunately he died in 1931 testing new engines in a Hawker Horsley. Both he and an engineer bailed out after engine failure. The engineer landed safely, but Uncle Richard hit a wall and died a couple of days later from his wounds.

His plane is in the Solent Sky Museum along with his sword.

Wonderful to see this lesser known aircraft in the spotlight. Family connections aside, I'd love to see more documentaries about lesser known aircraft.

Cheers!

[DisneyJF]

The Macchi Castoldi MC 72 was a absolute stunner. I think that was was the most beautiful sea plane ever created for the Schneider Trophy. What a beauty.🤩🤩😍😍

[Deviation]

RR engineers actually helped the Fiat engineers stop their engines from detonating (in the MC. 72) through being over stuffed with air from the long ram intake. The RR team helped to stabilise the fuel mixture control to stop the fatal inflight backfires. So Britain helped Fiat/Macchi set their still standing record when you think about it. Gotta give the Italians credit though in developing tandem engines behind a contra prop in the 1st place.

[HorsleyLandy]

My Great Uncle did the wind tunnel tests on the S6B at the National Physics Laboratory. I have a letter from the Aeronautical Research Committee, thanking him for his work, 14th May 1932.
During the war he went to America to work on the Manhattan project.

[kfeltenberger]

Back in the late 1970s, as a boy I built a motorized model of the S.6 and thought it was the most elegant airplane I had ever seen.

[dananichols]

Great photo of Jimmy Doolittle (10:25) with the 1925 Curtiss entry. His auto-biography "I Could Never Be So Lucky Again" is fantastic -- and a wealth of aviation anecdotes and history.

[BlackHawkBallistic]

Man that MC 72 is such a good looking plane, it looks like its going fast just sitting still

[oldesertguy]

I love the art deco look of those planes. Beautiful.

[xvdd]

The R engines were not just confined to the air they were also used by Sir Henry Segrave, Campbell's Bluebird and Eyston's Thunderbolt capturing world speed records on land and water.

[mpetersen]

What amazes me is that these racing aircraft were faster than land planes with those huge floats hanging out in the breeze.

[wlewisiii]

I look forward to your Schneider Cup videos for US and Italy air craft now. This was damn fun :) Thanks!

[redknight]

The 109 ended up with aspirations at the same common ancestry. The Spitfite/109 rivalry began long before the war had started with envious eyes.

[SoloRenegade]

The Supermarine racers are rather well known, but I still learned so much. I feel this is the best summary of the history and details of this line of aircraft I've ever seen.

[robertdragoff]

I hope you’ll do a video on the Bendix Trophy which ran from 1931 to 1962.

I’d like to see the evolution of airplanes during the run of these races.

[tobyrobson]

Well done Rex - your choice of in-depth subject matter and handling of the story and material is spot on once again. Keep ploughing this rich furrow! As tempting as the mainstream manufacturers marques are concerned, the lesser told histories are the ones which have forged your brand as the best YouTube channel for historical aviation documentary. Don't stop, and don't change!

[jorehir]

It was amazing how fast top speed progressed. They were making like 50km/h improvements each year!

[cartmanrlsusall]

It's funny that the Curtis floatplane beat everyone so bad that they canceled the race and everyone built floatplanes 😂

[mudcrab]

The Schneider aircraft have to be some of the most stylishly sexy aircraft ever built.

[alexforshaw]

Fab! I had the great pleasure of seeing Supermarine S6A N248 (the 1929 world speed record holder that also appeared in the 1942 film biography of R. J. Mitchell, "The First of the Few") at the Solent Sky Museum in Southampton earlier this year.