THE Oxfordshire flying club behind plans to create a new squadron of Spitfires has said it has been inundated with offers of help.

Last week, the Oxford Mail reported how Enstone Flying Club and the Spitfire Club plans to build 12 replicas of the legendary fighter planes by the end of the year to form a new City of Oxford Squadron.

And already, 650 people have registered their interest to help with the unique project.

The 90 per cent scale planes, built from kits imported from the USA, will each take 2,000 hours to construct. They won’t have Rolls Royce Merlin engines but V6 ones built by General Motors.

Shareholders are needed to fund the construction, each paying between £11,000 and £17,000 for a part share in a plane, while the club needs volunteers to help build them.

Club owner Paul Fowler said the public response had been “incredible”.

He said: “It has been brilliant. We have had fantastic letters, emails and people leaving messages.

“There have been lots of people offering help.

“People were still operating Spitfires up to the 1970s, not on the front line, but towing targets and that sort of thing.

“There are people out there with experience of working with them and flying them.”

He added: “One old chap left a phone message saying: “‘I’m 75-years-old and if you can collect me from Oxford station and put me up for a week, I will work on the Spitfires for it. I want to do something before I go to the skies myself’.”

Each plane costs £200,000 to build, funded by between 12 and 20 shareholders formed in a syndicate.

One plane is already fully funded, the second has got three-quarters of the backing it needs, and a third had half of the necessary support. The squadron will need £2.4m of backing to complete.

Volunteers and backers have come forwards from USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, and the Spitfire’s wartime nemesis Germany.

Mr Fowler added: “With six people working on a plane at any one time, it could be finished fairly quickly.

“The plan has always been to have all 12 completed by the end of 2012.

It is an ambitious target, but it is possible.

“This has never been done anywhere in the world. People have talked about doing it before, but now I have been elevated from a ‘nut’ to an ‘eccentric’.”

He said the Spitfire remained an iconic national symbol.

“Everyone knows it did not win the Battle of Britain on its own, but it looked the part and people saw them. It is a symbol of hope and defiance.

“If you want to stop a crowd dead, you fly a Spitfire past.”

  • For more details of the project, see spitfireclub.co.uk