In article . net,
(DDAY) wrote:

Spitfire would help to repair some damage that the Pentagon's
ham-fisted management has done with the international partners.

Not sure about that. The Spitfire was /ours/ and having another country
name an aircraft as a successor feels a bit off. In a way, I don't feel
we're quite finished with the original Spitfire.

The fact that it's the military aircraft I most often see in flight
probably has a lot to do with this. I live in south Cambridge, about the
right distance from the Imperial War Museum's airfield at Duxford to be
overflown in wide circuits. The military aircraft I see next most often
is the C-130, simply because there's a main European repair and service
base for them at Marshall's, about a mile from me.

I would have no complaints about the F-35 just being called "Spitfire",
mind you. It's a good name for a fighter, and there have been plenty of
planes with duplicate names from different nations. The English Electric
(later BAC) Lightning jet fighter wasn't called "Lightning II", even
though the RAF had used Lockheed P-38 Lightnings.

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John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.