Spitfire: Second World War fighter plane crashes in Kent, but pilot and passenger 'uninjured'

A Second World War Spitfire fighter plane has crashed in a field in Kent.
The plane, owned by Fly A Spitfire, went down "in the vicinity of Hythe on 03/05/2025 (Saturday)", the company said in a statement on its website.
In a statement, the firm said: "We are aware of an incident involving one of our Spitfire aircraft.
"We can confirm that a precautionary landing was made at a non-airfield site. The pilot and passenger are uninjured and at this stage we have no further information."
Witnesses told local media the plane "misfired above a caravan park" and "narrowly" missed trees before it crashed in a field.
Video of the incident showed the plane heading towards the ground, but no evidence of an explosion was filmed.
The crash happened in the build-up to the , but although some reports said the plane was rehearsing for them, this has not been confirmed.
Fly A Spitfire, which charges between £450 and £1,800 for an outing in one of its aircraft, said its Spitfire flight operations "will continue as planned".
This Thursday, 8 May, marks exactly 80 years since victory in Europe following the Second World War, was declared.
Thousands of people are expected to line the streets of central London on Monday to see a military procession and a flypast as well as a performance of Sir Winston Churchill's 1945 victory address, read by actor Timothy Spall, who played Britain's wartime leader in the 2010 film, The King's Speech.
Spitfires played a huge role in the eventual victory during the Battle of Britain, by "defending British airspace against the German Luftwaffe from July to October 1940," Spitfires.com said.

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John Deth (Hommage a Conrad Aiken) by Edward Burra, 1931 The art of Edward Burra is also the art of popping up in unlikely places. He was in the audience in Paris when Josephine Baker made her debut at La Revue Nègre in 1925 and in New York during the Harlem Renaissance; he visited Mexico with Malcolm Lowry and was in Spain as tensions bubbled towards the Civil War; he lived in coastal England during the Second World War witnessing troops departing – and sometimes returning – from the continent and captured the incursion of A-roads and pylons into the ancient landscapes of Cornwall and Wales in the early 1970s. If Burra was Zelig with a paintbrush he was also part of a strand of eccentric English art that, had its origins in William Blake and ran through Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. 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