"The Wolf Is Hungry"*

CCLXXXV

The Hawker Hurricane

In many respects the Hawker Hurricane is the Harry S Truman of aircraft. At first glance it seems to have been utterly overshadowed by its predecessor the Supermarine Spitfire. Yet the Hurricane was a no-nonsense commonsense aircraft that could get the job done without theatrics or praise.

The Hurricane has a noble lineage, for Hawker Ltd. started its corporate life as Sopwith Ltd., and during World War I provided the United Kingdom and its allies with the legendary Sopwith Camel and Sopwith Pup. The company had been building aircraft for the RAF since. As an established vendor of warplanes to the Crown, Sopwith / Hawker rarely bothered with Air Shows and other such folderol, and its planes --- and their designers --- eschewed the limelight. The Sopwith / Hawker ships were sturdy and dependable warplanes, if not especially innovative.

Though the single-seat Sopwith Camel of 1917 was not a “pilot’s airplane,” once its flying characteristics were mastered it proved a formidable opponent to the foe. Camels shot down a total of 1,294 enemy aircraft in World War I, more than any other Allied plane, and the big, rugged ship could be modified for ground attack, night combat, shipboard launch, or for use as a bomber. 5,490 were built. The plane was a shade under 19 feet long, it had a 48 foot wingspan, and had a top speed of 113 miles per hour

The preeminent RAF fighter aircraft of the early 1930s was the Hawker Fury. It had started out as the Hawker F.20/27 of 1927, a single seat metal framed interceptor-fighter sheathed in wood and canvas, with the seemingly-obligatory biplane configuration the Air Ministry insisted upon. The F.20/27 proved to be underpowered, but with the exchange of a larger engine, the Rolls Royce Kestrel, the Fury came into being in 1931. It was the first RAF plane capable of reaching 200 miles per hour. It proved to be a nimble, even acrobatic aircraft, but it was obsolescent even as it came off Hawker’s assembly lines. The Fury’s designer, Sidney Camm kept tweaking the design, creating variants like the High Speed Fury and the Fury II.

The Hawker Fury was an excellent airplane to fly, but by the time it went into service as a warplane it was obsolete. It was pulled out of service in early 1939. The RAF replaced it with yet another biplane, their last, the Gloster Gladiator. During the 1930s numbers of Furys were sold to nations that the U.K. assessed would be opponents of Naziism in the coming war, including Republican Spain. The Fury saw combat action in Yugoslavia in 1941, but the plane was no match for the Messerschmitt Bf-109, and almost the entire Yugoslav Air Force was shot down in the course of one April day

Sidney Camm did not have R.J. Mitchell’s background in racing planes, but he read the same articles, reviewed the same reports, and came to the same conclusions as Mitchell at the same time. The RAF would be no match, he knew, for Germany’s modern Luftwaffe. In 1933, he began to design a monoplane version of the Fury, which was designated the P.V.3. 

In its first iteration, the new aircraft was still an all-wood, canvas-covered affair with side struts supporting the wings. It was not selected by the Air Ministry. 

Camm went back to the drawing board. He knew, of course, of R.J. Mitchell’s bitter disappointment with the “224” Spitfire which had been outright rejected by the Air Ministry, but he liked the general concept. Ignoring the Air Ministry’s dictates about form, he focused on function. 

Sir Sydney Camm CBE (1893 – 1966), the inventor of the Hawker Hurricane, was described in the same terms as R.J. Mitchell, as “The Man Who Saved Britain”

This time, Camm adopted the idea of retractable landing gear, and did away with the side struts, reducing drag and giving the airframe a smoother profile. He enclosed the cockpit. Like R.J. Mitchell, he ordered up a powerful Merlin engine for the plane.  But unlike Mitchell, Camm decided to stick with a more traditional metal frame sheathed in wood and covered with doped canvas, rather than all-metal construction. He also opted for a fixed-pitch wooden propeller at first, but when subsequent testing showed that the plane could lift off more quickly in a shorter space with a variable-pitch metal propeller Camm happily upgraded.

Another alteration was the fairing of the cockpit into the fuselage. Camm wanted the pilot to have the widest possible field of view, so he “humped” the ventral line of the fuselage, lifting the canopy high above the fore of the plane.

The prototype was ready for review in 1934. The Air Ministry provisionally approved the airplane but fell into a bureaucratic squabble that lasted for months as to whether the new plane should have four guns or six. It was Camm’s turn to be flabbergasted at the idiocy of the pure bureaucrat --- Why would anyone want less firepower in a warplane?

In this drawing the humpback configuration of the Hurricane is clearly evident, as are its simple lines

Finally, he presented the Air Ministry with a fait accompli by delivering the completed prototype with six guns. 

A more serious problem was that the new aircraft was bad at recovering from spins. It was so bad in fact, that Hawker asked that further spin tests be waived. The Ministry refused outright, advising Hawker that if the problem was not corrected the plane would be rejected. It only made sense. Any aircraft can spin but a fighter aircraft that was doomed in a spin wasn’t of much use.  It turned out to be a relatively easy fix in the event. Small fairings were added to each side of the rudder and to the ailerons, altering the airflow over these control surfaces. The spins decreased to an acceptable level. 

For eighty years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the Hurricane or the Spitfire was a better aircraft. The truth was that they complimented each other perfectly. The Hurricane was a more stable gun platform and was the “bomber killer” the RAF had wanted, while the Spitfire engaged in screaming dogfights against the Bf-109 with dramatic and permanent conclusions

The plane was called the P.V.12. at this point, but Hawker suggested the name “Hurricane” for the type. The Air Ministry was delighted. They loved fighter aircraft names that “suggested ferocity.” Like R.J. Mitchell who thought that Spitfire was “a bloody silly name” Camm thought that the need to “suggest ferocity” in the name of a warplane was rather like putting teats on a boar.

Although the Hawker was designed a little later and approved a little later than the Spitfire, at the outset the Hurricane rolled off the assembly lines much more quickly and in greater numbers than its dancing partner.

The Sydney Camm Memorial at his birthplace in Windsor is a full-sized mock-up of a Hurricane in flight set atop a pylon

The R.J. Mitchell Memorial at Castle Bromwich the town where the vast majority of Spitfires were assembled. Neither R.J. nor Sydney Camm craved the spotlight. Both men insisted they were just part of a team. And both earned knighthoods  

There were several reasons for this. Hawker was a much larger company than Supermarine, with a far larger factory that could handle orders for 300 planes in a lot without batting an eye. The Hurricane was much less expensive to build per unit cost (wood and canvas being cheaper than steel). And the assembly process was quicker. With a fairly straightline airframe the only requirement to bring a Hawker online was to fit the wings, while the curved metal panels of the Spitfire had to be laboriously assembled like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. One frustrated Supermarine employee (undoubtedly hired after R.J.’s death) said, “This plane was drawn up by a bloke who never thought about flying it.” 

Consequently, Spitfire deliveries were slow, while Hurricane deliveries were much quicker. By 1939, roughly 65% of the fighter squadrons in the RAF were equipped with Hurricanes, while less than 30% were outfitted with Spitfires. It seemed like the sexy Spitfire might just be a footnote in aviation history.   

Few Hurricanes and Spitfires exist and even less are airworthy today, but when they do appear (at air shows) they always accompany each other. The Hurricane was brawnier, the Spitfire more lithe

*I’ve cribbed the title of this post from The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane”. I think it’s appropriate  😊