Jeffrey Quill
British test pilot (1913–1996)
Jeffrey Kindersley Quill, (1 February 1913 – 20 February 1996) was a British test pilot who served on secondment with the Royal Air Force and Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War. He was also the second man to fly the Supermarine Spitfire after Vickers Aviation's chief test pilot, Joseph "Mutt" Summers. After succeeding Summers as Vickers' chief test pilot, Quill test-flew every mark of Spitfire. Quill's work on the aircraft aided its development from a promising but untried prototype to become, with the Hawker Hurricane, an instrument of the Royal Air Force's victory in the Battle of Britain. The Spitfire later played a leading role in gaining Allied air superiority over Europe. Quill later wrote two books about the Spitfire.
Early years
Quill was born at Littlehampton, Sussex, the youngest of the five children of Arthur Maxwell Quill and Emily Molesworth Kindersley. He was educated at Lancing College, which overlooked Shoreham aerodrome, at that time a small grass field with old hangars and a wooden hut for a flying club. While at Lancing, Quill became Captain of Gibbs House (1930) and Prefect (1931). He played in the Cricket XI (1930–31); Football XI (1929–30); and was Sergeant in the Officers' Training Corps, Cert.
“Jeffrey Quill” enters the record as british test pilot (1913–1996). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jeffrey, Quill and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6176218. VIAF identifies the subject as 28361493. The Library of Congress control number is n79149369. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1913, 1996, 1930 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jeffrey Quill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.