The History of the Spitfire

Early Spitfires had flush riveting, which is a good way to make them faster. They did some experiments on early Spitfires by gluing split peas onto the spots where the rivets were all over the plane and then flying it doing a speed test basically. It was about 20, 22 miles an hour slower. Couldn't you have stopped the enemy by going in and putting peas on his plane? Definitely. That was a big part of the early SAS job. I used to do that and so did my wife. So that fact would be even more impressive if I knew what a rivet was. Yeah, well, you've got to retain some mystery, I'm afraid.