Seventy years ago, during the Second World War, an iconic aircraft came to Britain's rescue - the Spitfire.
Today, Britain is under another, different, threat - youth unemployment - and once more, the Spitfire is coming to the rescue, albeit not with guns blazing this time.
One of Britain's more unusual apprenticeship schemes, helping to lower the number of young people currently not in employment or training, can be found on the very airfield where the RAF took delivery of its first Spitfires at Duxford, just outside Cambridge.
That's where owner John Romain set up The Aircraft Restoration Company (ARCo) - the largest Spitfire restoration and maintenance company in the world.
Ten years ago, he says, when he wanted to expand ARCo, there weren't enough trained engineers he could take on to reassemble "25 boxes of debris into a flyable Spitfire worth £3 million".
Because old skills had begun to die out, Romain started training engineers through apprenticeships based on the scheme formerly run by aircraft manufacturer De Havilland, which was once regarded as the best in the world.
Romain chooses his apprentices from young people who have already undertaken work experience at ARCo.
"It is important for us," he says, "It gives us engineers for the future that have got the right skills. The environment has become an industry and like any industry it must support its youth."
Many of the Spitfires seen at air shows across Britain and Europe have been resurrected and are maintained by ARCo, together with many of the aircraft making up the RAF's Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.
Recently ARCo, with the help of apprentice engineers who have stayed with the company for over twenty years, was working on restoring an original Mark 1 Spitfire recovered from under the sand of a French beach where it had crashed and remained for decades.
What sets ARCo's apprenticeship schemes apart from the majority of others across the nation is that the training is entirely self-funded, and Romain wants the government to make it easier for small companies to get access to funding for training apprentices.
