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Royal Air Force mechanics add ballast to a Hawker Hurricane while either its pilot or another mechanic test runs its engine.

It was common, for instance, for a fitter to sit on the tail plane when a Spitfire was taxiing on rough terrain as the aircraft was tail-light and nose-heavy. To prevent the tail bouncing up and the propeller striking the ground, fitters often rode the tailplane all the way to the takeoff point.

This practice had a freak outcome on one occasion when a pilot took off without first allowing his female fitter, Margaret Horton to get off. As strange as it may seem, Horton rode this way, clinging to the vertical stabilizer all the way through a circuit after the pilot suddenly realized what he had done but was too high to land straight ahead.

The story on the BBC People’s War website, written by Mary Blood:

“Involved a W.A.A.F. flight mechanic, ACW Margaret Horton, and a veteran Spitfire. When an aircraft engine had been serviced, the practice was for the training instructors to run the engine and do a particular test. Margaret had finished work on the Spitfire, when the pilot began this test. It was necessary, if it was windy, for a mechanic to sit on the tail of the aircraft while it taxied to the end of the runway ready for takeoff. The mechanics were given the order, ‘Tails’. Having got to the runway, the aircraft would pause for the mechanic to drop off. This time the pilot did not pause. Whether he was unaware that the order to ‘tail’ had been given, nobody knows. He just carried on with Margaret Horton hanging on for grim death, and him unaware that he had a ‘passenger’ on the tail. ‘I thought the aircraft was tail-heavy’, he said later. The Spitfire had risen to 800 feet or more when the strange shape of the tailplane was noticed from the ground. The emergency services were called out and the pilot talked back in without being told what had happened. The aircraft landed safely with Margaret Horton still in one piece. Just how daft the [bureaucratic] machinery of the R.A.F. could be was shown when she was reprimanded for her unofficial flight and charged for the loss of her beret! She was posted later to West Raynham and, despite her ordeal, survived into her eighties.”

This particular 17 Squadron Hurricane (P3482) was lost during the Battle of Britain when it crash landed. Its pilot survived

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