A SECOND World War Spitfire will make a sweep over the Solent off Milford-on-Sea on Saturday May 21 in a final salute to Battle of Britain pilot Vernon Simmonds who died this year.

Subject to weather conditions, the Spitfire will fly overhead as the ashes of Mr Simmonds are scattered from a boat off the Needles at midday while family, friends and former comrades watch from the clifftop.

The famous fighter aircraft which like its wartime pilots enjoyed "their finest hour" during the aerial combat which stopped Hitler's planned invasion of England in the summer of 1940 will also make a low-level pass over Mr Simmonds's home at Burley Manor in the New Forest.

One of the few remaining examples of the marque still flying, the Spitfire will be brought down from its base in Yorkshire by its owner and RAF Tornado jet pilot Wing Commander Paul Day.

The ashes drop operation has been organised by Mr Simmonds's fellow Battle of Britain veteran and long time friend Wing Commander Paddy Barthropp from Lymington who earned the DFC and AFC while flying Spitfires and later spent three years in a prisoner of war camp after being shot down in 1942.

Although Mr Simmonds flew Spitfires during the war it was in the cockpit of the less glamorous but equally effective Hawker Hurricane fighter that he joined the ranks of Battle of Britain pilots immortalised by Churchill's famous declaration "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few".

Later Mr Simmonds flew Spitfires from the Ibsley aerodrome near Ringwood where he met his wife Shirley, then a WAAF driver.

At the end of the war Mr Simmonds retired from the RAF with the rank of Squadron Leader and was European reservations department manager with Pan-American Airlines until 1949 when he retired to Burley where he built his Manor Farm home and established a herd of pedigree Friesian cattle.

Mr Simmonds, who died at his home in February at the age of 85, was also a local councillor during the 1950s and a keen sailor as a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

He is survived by his widow, the children's author Shirley Faulkner Horne, to whom he was married for 62 years and their daughter Anthea.

First published: May 19