The Scimitar is the end of a story that starts with the elliptical-winged Spitfire of 1936. Through the 1940s and 50s Supermarine built a run of naval jets — the Attacker, the swept-wing Swift for the RAF, and a chain of experimental carrier prototypes (Types 508, 525 and 544) — each feeding into the next. The definitive Scimitar F.1 was the culmination, a genuinely modern transonic strike fighter. But by the time it retired, the British aircraft industry was consolidating and the Supermarine name was absorbed into the wider Vickers/BAC empire. The Scimitar was, in effect, the last aircraft to carry the badge of the company that built the Spitfire — a poignant bookend to one of aviation’s most famous names.

The Scimitar was heavily armed for its day: four 30 mm ADEN cannon in the lower fuselage, plus four underwing hardpoints. Those pylons could carry iron bombs, rocket pods, AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for self-defence, the radio-command-guided AGM-12 Bullpup air-to-surface missile — which the pilot steered onto the target by eye with a thumb controller — or, in its primary role, Britain’s Red Beard tactical nuclear bomb. It was, in other words, a carrier fighter designed from the outset to deliver the Bomb at low level.

The Scimitar’s attrition is among the grimmest in post-war British aviation: of 76 built, about 39 were lost in accidents (roughly 51%), with around nine pilots killed. The causes were a mix — a heavy, demanding aircraft flown from straight-deck-era carriers during a period of rapid change, repeated hydraulic failures, in-flight fires and ditchings, and deck-landing accidents including failed arrestor wires. The most famous loss came on 25 September 1958, when the commanding officer of 803 NAS, Commander John Russell, made a good landing on the newly recommissioned HMS Victorious only for the No. 1 wire to fail; his Scimitar rolled slowly over the side and he drowned, trapped in the cockpit, as press and newsreel cameras recorded it. The tragedy drove reforms in underwater-escape training and ejection-seat design.

The Scimitar was a 1950s British state procurement, never sold on an open market, so no dependable flyaway unit price survives in the public record — and no credible cost-per-flight-hour figure exists for a Fleet Air Arm type of that era either. Any precise dollar or sterling number attached to a Scimitar today should be treated as an estimate rather than a sourced fact. What is clear is that it was an expensive, thirsty, twin-engined machine with a short service life and a very high loss rate — a poor return on a small production run of 76 airframes.