Above Ten Thousand
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United Kingdom · 1913–

Supermarine

Supermarine was a British aircraft manufacturer based at Woolston, on the banks of the River Itchen in Southampton. Noel Pemberton-Billing founded it in 1913 as Pemberton-Billing Ltd to build flying boats, and the name it became famous under came from the telegraphic address he registered for the firm — «Supermarine, Southampton». When he sold his shareholding to Hubert Scott-Paine in 1916, the new owner renamed the company Supermarine Aviation Works Ltd. For two decades it was Britain's specialist in seaplanes and flying boats, and it won the Schneider Trophy four times: in 1922 with the Sea Lion II, and in 1927, 1929 and 1931 with the S.5, S.6 and S.6B monoplanes designed by R. J. Mitchell. The last three wins came in a row, which secured the trophy for Britain outright, and the pursuit of speed taught the firm to build in metal. Vickers bought the company in 1928. The first Supermarine landplane to reach production was the Spitfire, the fighter forever associated with the Battle of Britain; its carrier-borne version, the Seafire, served with the Fleet Air Arm. After the war the company turned to naval jets — the Attacker, Swift and Scimitar — and its name disappeared when Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft) was folded into the British Aircraft Corporation in 1960; the Supermarine operation was closed in 1963.

Updated: July 31, 2026

History

A name taken from a telegram

Noel Pemberton-Billing — aviator, inventor and agitator — won a bet against Frederick Handley Page in 1913 that he could earn his pilot's licence within twenty-four hours of first sitting in an aircraft. With the five hundred pounds he had won he set up Pemberton-Billing Ltd that same year, on land beside the River Itchen at Woolston, Southampton, with Hubert Scott-Paine as works manager. For telegrams he registered an address that was the exact opposite of «submarine»: Supermarine, Southampton. He wanted boats that would fly rather than aircraft that would float, and the first result — the P.B.1, shown in 1914 — never got airborne. The war saved the workshop: subcontracted repairs, licence production and designs of its own arrived, among them the P.B.25, of which the Royal Naval Air Service bought twenty, and the extravagant anti-Zeppelin quadruplanes P.B.29 and P.B.31E Nighthawk. In 1916 Pemberton-Billing was elected to Parliament and, since he intended to campaign against the Royal Aircraft Factory, the firm had to distance itself from him: he sold his shares for about £12,500 to Scott-Paine and the other directors, who re-registered the business as Supermarine Aviation Works Ltd.

Flying boats and the chase for speed

After the armistice Supermarine was the only British constructor devoted exclusively to flying boats. It survived by converting surplus military hulls into the commercial Channel and by running an airline of its own. During the war it had hired a young engineer from Staffordshire, R. J. Mitchell, who was chief designer at twenty-four and joined the board as technical director in 1927. His first great success came in 1922, when the Sea Lion II — a reworked Sea King II with a Napier Lion engine — won the Schneider Trophy at Naples at 145.7 mph (234.5 km/h) and denied Italy outright possession of the cup. Mitchell then concluded that the racing flying boat was finished and turned to the monoplane floatplane: the S.4 set a world speed record of 226.75 mph (364.9 km/h) in 1925 but crashed before the contest; the S.5 dominated the 1927 race; the all-metal S.6, wrapped as tightly as possible around its Rolls-Royce engine, won in 1929; and the S.6B took the 1931 contest and the trophy outright before leaving the world record at 407.5 mph (655.67 km/h). Between races the firm's bread and butter was military flying boats: 83 Southamptons of all marks and, later, 740 Walrus amphibians.

Vickers, Mitchell and the Spitfire

In 1928 Vickers, freshly merged with Armstrong Whitworth, was looking for a flying-boat specialist to complement its landplane business. It bought Supermarine for £390,000 and renamed it Supermarine Aviation Works (Vickers) Ltd, although the works kept selling aircraft under its own name; in 1938 the group's aviation interests were reorganised as Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft) Ltd. Mitchell's first attempt at a land-based fighter, the Type 224, proved mediocre, and in 1934 he began a far cleaner design of his own, the Type 300, which the arrival of the future Merlin engine finally made worthwhile. It flew on 5 March 1936 at Eastleigh and the Air Ministry ordered 310 three months later. Mitchell never saw what he had started: he died in June 1937, aged forty-two, after years of cancer. He was succeeded by Joseph Smith, confirmed as chief designer in 1941, who wrung variant after variant out of the Spitfire — up to the Griffon-engined marks — and kept it in the front line to the end of the war.

The bombed factory

The Spitfire overwhelmed the company: that first order was more than double every aircraft it had built in the previous twenty years. The Luftwaffe made matters worse. On 24 and 26 September 1940 German bombers wrecked Woolston; the second raid killed 55 people and injured 92, left the factory beyond repair and destroyed the prototypes of the Type 317 heavy bomber. The answer was dispersal: 250 subcontractors and some 60 workshops spread across Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire, grouped into four production centres each with its own airfield, while the design office moved to Hursley House. The Southampton workforce grew from 2,880 at the outbreak of war to 10,000 by the end of 1944, half of them women, and those improvised workshops turned out 8,000 aircraft. The vast Castle Bromwich shadow factory contributed another 12,129, more than half of the 20,351 Spitfires built.

With no market left for flying boats, the post-war years pushed Supermarine towards the carrier jet. The Attacker, which married the Spiteful's wing to a new fuselage around a Nene engine, flew in July 1946 and in 1951 became the Fleet Air Arm's first jet fighter. It was followed by the swept-wing Swift, which took the absolute speed record in September 1953 at 735.7 mph (1,187 km/h) but had a short and accident-ridden career as an interceptor. The last aircraft entirely designed and built by the firm was the Scimitar, a naval strike aircraft descended from a series of V-tailed prototypes and withdrawn in 1969. In 1960 the British government forced the industry to consolidate and Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft) was merged with Bristol, English Electric and Hunting into the British Aircraft Corporation, which retired the old heritage names; the Supermarine operation closed in 1963. Of the Woolston works only the concrete slipway survives, alongside a plaque to those killed in 1940.

Catalog — Aircraft

  • 1924

    Supermarine Swan Sheet pending

  • 1924

    Supermarine Sparrow Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • Sparrow I
    • Sparrow II
  • 1925

    Supermarine Southampton Sheet pending

    Variants (3)
    • Mk I
    • Mk II
    • Mk III
  • 1925

    Supermarine S.4 Sheet pending

  • 1927

    Supermarine S.5 Sheet pending

  • 1927

    Supermarine Nanok Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • Nanok
    • Solent
  • 1928

    Supermarine Seamew Sheet pending

  • 1933

    Supermarine Walrus Sheet pending

    Variants (3)
    • Seagull V
    • Walrus I
    • Walrus II
  • 1934

    Supermarine Type 224 Sheet pending

  • 1934

    Supermarine Stranraer Sheet pending

  • 1936

    Supermarine Spitfire

    The Supermarine Spitfire is the British single-seat fighter with which the Royal Air Force fought the Second World War from beginning to end, and the aeroplane in which Britain invests its memory of 1940. It was designed by R. J. Mitchell at Supermarine Aviation Works, a Vickers-Armstrong subsidiary; the prototype flew on 5 March 1936 and the first aircraft reached the RAF in August 1938. By the time the last one left the factory, in February 1948, 20,351 had been built across twenty-four marks, alongside 2,646 navalised Seafires for the Royal Navy. It was the only British fighter produced continuously throughout the war. Its ancestry lies in the racing seaplanes with which Britain dominated the Schneider Trophy. Mitchell's first fighter, the Type 224 submitted to specification F.7/30, flew in February 1934 and disappointed: open cockpit, fixed undercarriage and an engine that failed to deliver. The firm pressed on as a private venture with a new design — the Type 300, with retractable undercarriage, reduced span and the Rolls-Royce PV-12 that would become the Merlin — which the Air Ministry backed on 1 December 1934 with a £10,000 contract to build the prototype. What made the aeroplane unmistakable was the elliptical wing drawn by the aerodynamicist Beverley Shenstone, chosen not for looks but because it allowed the thinnest possible section while leaving room inside for the undercarriage, the guns and their ammunition. The prototype K5054 lifted off from Eastleigh on 5 March 1936 with Joseph 'Mutt' Summers at the controls, and in June 1936 the Ministry ordered 310 aircraft. Building that wing proved far harder than drawing it and deliveries slipped: the first production Spitfire left Woolston in mid-1938 and on 4 August the RAF took delivery at Duxford for No. 19 Squadron; when war broke out only nine squadrons were equipped. Mitchell never saw it in action, having died of cancer in 1937, and his colleague Joseph Smith took over as chief designer, answering for every mark through to the 24. The Luftwaffe struck at the source on 26 September 1940, destroying the Woolston factories and killing 92 people, which forced production to be scattered across workshops and garages in southern England; Castle Bromwich, in Birmingham, became the programme's industrial heart, delivering 12,129 aircraft. In the Battle of Britain the Hurricane was more numerous and flew more sorties, but the Spitfire was held back for the Messerschmitt Bf 109E, and it suffered lower attrition with a better ratio of victories to losses. Its real advantage was the airframe's room to grow: from the Mk I, with a 1,030 hp Merlin, came the Mk V and its 1,470 hp Merlin 45, the most numerous mark of all; the arrival of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 in 1941 forced a stopgap — the Mk IX, with a two-stage supercharged Merlin — that restored parity and passed 650 km/h; and the step up to the larger Rolls-Royce Griffon culminated in the Mk XIV, whose 2,050 hp Griffon 65 took it past 700 km/h. The photographic reconnaissance versions, stripped of guns and lightened to fly high and unescorted, photographed the German Freya and Würzburg radars and in 1943 confirmed over Peenemünde the German retaliation-weapons programme; the Seafire took the type to carrier decks, from Operation Torch to Korea. Its military career faded slowly. The last operational sortie by an RAF Spitfire was flown by a PR Mk 19 of No. 81 Squadron on 1 April 1954 from Seletar, over Johore, during the Malayan Emergency; the type's last RAF flight, by then with no military role, took place on 9 June 1957 at Woodvale, and Ireland kept its own until 1961. Around sixty airframes remain airworthy today, several of them flying with the RAF's Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, which keeps them in the air as a memorial.

  • 1938

    Supermarine Sea Otter Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • Sea Otter Mk I
    • Sea Otter Mk II
  • 1942

    Supermarine Seafire Sheet pending

    Variants (6)
    • Seafire F Mk 47
    • Seafire F Mk III
    • Seafire Mk Ib
    • Seafire Mk IIc
    • Seafire Mk XV
    • Seafire Mk XVII
  • 1943

    Supermarine Type 322 Sheet pending

  • 1944

    Supermarine Spiteful Sheet pending

    Variants (3)
    • F Mk 14
    • F Mk 15
    • F Mk 16
  • 1946

    Supermarine Attacker Sheet pending

    Variants (7)
    • Attacker F.1
    • Attacker FB.1
    • Attacker FB.2
    • Attacker FB.50
    • Type 392
    • Type 398
    • Type 513
  • 1948

    Supermarine Seagull (1948) Sheet pending

  • 1951

    Supermarine Swift Sheet pending

    Variants (9)
    • Swift F.Mk 1
    • Swift F.Mk 2
    • Swift F.Mk 3
    • Swift F.Mk 4
    • Swift F.Mk 7
    • Swift FR.Mk 5
    • Type 510
    • Type 517
    • Type 535
  • 1954

    Supermarine Type 525 Sheet pending

  • 1956

    Supermarine Scimitar Sheet pending

    Variants (4)
    • Scimitar F.1
    • Type 508
    • Type 529
    • Type 544
  • —

    Supermarine Seafang Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • Seafang F Mk.31
    • Seafang F Mk.32
  • —

    Supermarine Sea King Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • Sea King I
    • Sea King II
  • —

    Pemberton-Billing P.B.9 Sheet pending

  • —

    AD Navyplane Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine S.6B Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Baby Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Sea Eagle Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • Scarab
    • Sea Eagle
  • —

    Supermarine Sea Lion II Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Sea Lion I Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Channel Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • Channel I
    • Channel II
  • —

    Supermarine Air Yacht Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Sea Lion III Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Seagull (1921) Sheet pending

    Variants (3)
    • Seagull Mk I
    • Seagull Mk II
    • Seagull Mk III
  • —

    Pemberton-Billing P.B.25 Sheet pending

  • —

    AD Flying Boat Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Nighthawk Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Seal II Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Scapa Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine Commercial Amphibian Sheet pending

  • —

    Supermarine S.6 Sheet pending

    Variants (2)
    • S.6
    • S.6A
  • —

    Supermarine Sheldrake Sheet pending