Spitfire PT879 Rolled off the production line at Castle Bromwich 4th August 1944. That October after flight testing she made the long sea journey from Cardiff in Wales to Murmansk. There she joined the 2nd squadron, 767th regiment 122nd Division of the Soviet Air Force. On 18th May 1945 she was involved in a collision with another spitfire over the Kola Peninsular the pilot Lt Semyonov escaped, inverted and in a flat spin she hit the ground, at the time she had just 18 hours or so on her clock. In 1997 a recovery team moved the battered but substantially complete airframe to St. Petersburg. Peter Monk acquired the wreck and returned her home to England, sold to Angie Soper in 1998 who in turn passed the aircraft on to Peter Teichman who stored the airframe for a number of years, before commissioning Airframe Assemblies to restore the fuselage at their facility on the Isle of Wight. The fuselage was returned to Peter after 3 years. After collecting a lot of missing parts for the rest of the airframe the aircraft rebuild was left in the hands of Peter Monk`s Biggin Hill Heritage Hangar in 2018. The restoration was completed and the aircraft is in the livery worn by the aircraft in 1945. A substantial number of components from the original wreck were deemed to be of sufficient quality to refurbish for reuse in the restored airframe. This Spitfire is the 11th example which the Biggin Hill Heritage Hangar have completed a truly remarkable achievement.
