Links With The Spitfire
On 5 March 1936 the first test flight of the Supermarine Spitfire took place at the airport, an event commemorated in 2004 with the erection of a near-full size sculpture of K5054, the prototype Spitfire at the road entrance.
On 5 March 2006 at 16:30 GMT, five restored Spitfires took off from Southampton Airport to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the first flight of the Spitfire at the precise same time as the test flights in 1936.
There are plans, supported by the local council, to rename the airport after R. J. Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire. However, the choice whether to rename the airport lies with BAA.
In 2010, the airport opened new restaurant and bar facilities named after the designer R.J. Mitchell, called Mitchell's Kitchen & Bar both landside and airside.
Read more about this topic: Southampton Airport
Famous quotes containing the words links with and/or links:
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)