Hawker Hurricane

The Hawker Hurricane was a British single-seater monoplane fighter aircraft conceived by Chief Designer Sydney Camm at Hawker Aircraft in the early 1930s.  It saw exemplary service in the Second World War and accounted for around 55% of RAF Fighter Command's victories in the Battle of Britain.The Hawker Hurricane emerged from the Hawker PV.3, a design to meet Specification F.7/30. Essentially a scaled-up Hawker Fury, it failed to receive government funding for the building of a prototype. Despite this setback, Hawker Aircraft were so convinced of its significance that they continued with the aircraft’s development as a private venture. Sydney Camm revised his design into a cantilever monoplane, complete with a retractable undercarriage and fitted the Rolls-Royce PV-12 engine, soon to be known as the Rolls-Royce Merlin.

In September 1934 Camm finally received the funding for a full-size prototype, although a number of major changes were made during the mock-up and final prototype construction phases. By August 1935, the various components were completed by Hawkers at their factory at Kingston before they were moved by road to nearby Brooklands for reassembly.  Following ground testing, the first prototype (K5083) flew on 6th November 1935, in the hands of Chief Test Pilot 'George' Bulman. In a dramatic commercial gamble, and without a single order on the books, but convinced of the aircraft’s worth, the Board of Directors at Hawker Aircraft immediately ‘tooled-up’ their new factory at Langley, near Slough, ready to start production.

During its successful trials at the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE) at Martlesham Heath in early 1936, the RAF Test Pilot Sammy Wroath reported: ‘The aircraft is simple and easy to fly and has no apparent vices’. Full RAF acceptance was granted in June of that same year, with an initial order for 600 aircraft. The following month, in an informal naming ceremony timed to coincide with a visit of King Edward VIII to Martlesham Heath, the proposed ‘Hurricane’ name was confirmed.

While the majority of Hurricanes were built by Hawker (at their Brooklands and Langley sites), some 2,750 were also built by Gloster Aircraft at Hucclecote, with a further 300 aircraft built at Austin Aero Company at Longbridge. Hurricanes were also built overseas, with 1,451 being constructed by the Canadian Car and Foundry Company (CC&F) in Fort William, Ontario, where their production was overseen by Chief Aeronautical Engineer Elsie McGill, who earned the nickname ‘Queen of the Hurricanes’ for her work. The aircraft played a vital role in the Battle of Britain, when a total of 1,715 Hawker Hurricanes flew with Fighter Command, and while the Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire is forever synonymous with those critical months between July and October 1940, it was the Hurricane that scored the most aerial victories in that period (55% for Hurricanes compared to 42% for Spitfires). In all, 24 variants of the Hawker Hurricane were created, with around 14,483 aircraft built in total. The last Hawker Hurricane (PZ865) rolled off the production line at Langley in July 1944.