[winny]

I'd just like to add a little example of how procedures differed during the war when compared to peacetime/modern times.

Spitfires suffered from a couple of problems that would today result in the grounding of the fleet. Namely the "Skew Gear problem" in Merlins where the skew gear would fail randomly and catastrophically, (this happened to Alex Henshaw a number of times) and the Piston seizures on Packard Merlins - caused by the fact that the piston heads were not machined, to save time, and were left to wear to shape, or in some cases seize as the push rods got bent. Neither of these problems would be acceptable today. They simply could not afford to halt production to find the source of the skew gear problem, so they continued making the engines as was, up until the point that they fixed it. This almost certainly cost lives and certainly cost aircraft.