Creating balance with all my Hurricane profiles so far posted, here are the early Spitfires. With all the literature that has been published on the Spitfire not a great deal is left to say, but here are a few notes for modellers.

The first squadron to get them was 19 Sqn, based at Duxford near Cambridge in August 1938. Like 111 Squadron’s Hurricanes they had the squadron number painted on them for identity, without any code letters or badges. Roundels on the fuselage and upper wings were Type A1 with yellow outer ring, with Type A (no yellow) below the wings. Undersurfaces were painted silver all over, with black serial numbers below the wings. With the Munich Crisis slightly later in 1938 grey code letters were introduced for identity, with the smaller size blue/red roundels on the fuselage and upper wings only. Undersurfaces were painted black on the left side and white on the right with the fuselage usually silver. No markings were applied to the undersurfaces at all at this stage. In the summer of 1940 undersurfaces were changed to sky, which led to the use of different colours for a time due to the lack of any paint stocks of the official sky colour! Various colours described as duck-egg green, duck-egg blue, eau de nil, and the official sky blue and possibly sky grey were used, including ordinary commercial, non-aircraft, oil paints on the squadrons. This situation went on for an unknown period of time (weeks?) from June 1940 and affected many RAF aircraft.

Detail differences applied to Spitfires through this period were: armoured windscreen from autumn 1939; rear view mirror from February 1940, and the change of radio aerial mast and wires from May 1940. As usual, it’s always best to check with photos where possible for any particular aircraft being modelled. Any questions you may have about my profiles I’m happy to hear from you and will do my best to answer.

27 additional images. Click to enlarge.