Hawker Hurricane: the RAF's Battle of Britain workhorse

The Hawker Hurricane is a British single-seat fighter built by Hawker Aircraft Ltd. Designed as an interceptor for the Royal Air Force, it became the backbone of RAF Fighter Command in 1940 and shot down more Luftwaffe aircraft than any other type during the Battle of Britain¹, even though the more famous Spitfire flew alongside it that summer.

Design and development

Sydney Camm designed the Hurricane at Hawker as a monoplane derivative of the earlier Hawker Fury biplane. He discussed an outline “Fury Monoplane” with the Air Ministry as early as December 1933 and presented the complete design in September 1934; the Ministry ordered a prototype in February 1935. The prototype, K5083, first flew on 6 November 1935, flown by George Bulman. The Air Ministry placed its first production order, for 600 aircraft, in June 1936, and the type was officially named “Hurricane” on 26 June 1936. The first production Hurricane I flew on 12 October 1937, and the type entered squadron service that December with No. 111 Squadron RAF¹.

The airframe was deliberately conservative: a Warren truss steel box-girder fuselage braced with duralumin and covered in wooden formers and doped linen, with two steel-spar wings that were originally fabric-covered to speed up production. That construction made the Hurricane easier to repair in the field than the Spitfire’s stressed-skin structure, a quality that kept squadrons flying through the heaviest fighting of 1940. The design was not without flaws: the prototype suffered spin-recovery problems serious enough that all rudder authority could be lost, fixed by the Royal Aircraft Establishment with a ventral fairing and rudder extension fitted from the 61st production aircraft. An unprotected gravity fuel tank sat in the forward fuselage, directly in front of the instrument panel¹, a fire risk later addressed by coating it in self-expanding Linatex rubber.

Variants

The Hurricane Mk I was the initial production version, armed with eight wing-mounted Browning machine guns and fitted first with a wooden two-blade fixed-pitch propeller, later replaced by a de Havilland variable-pitch unit that cut the take-off run from 1,230 to 750 ft. From April 1939 a stressed-skin metal wing replaced the original fabric-covered wing, allowing an 80 mph higher diving speed, while still bolting onto the same airframe. The more powerful Hurricane Mk II entered service from September 1940: the Mk IIC carried four 20 mm cannon and could lift a 500 lb bomb load, and the Mk IID was a dedicated ground-attack variant armed with 40 mm cannon. The Royal Navy flew the Sea Hurricane, fitted with an arrestor hook for carrier operations, with some early examples launched by catapult from merchant ships as convoy escorts¹.

In all, 14,487 Hurricanes were built in Britain and Canada between 1937 and 1944, the bulk of them 9,986 by Hawker itself, with a further 2,750 built by Gloster Aircraft Company, 300 by Austin and 1,451 by Canadian Car and Foundry¹.

Operators and service

The Hurricane entered combat in the “Phoney War”, with its first action on 21 October 1939 against Heinkel He 115 floatplanes. During the Battle of France in May 1940, 452 Hurricanes were committed and 178 were abandoned in the retreat; RAF pilots claimed heavily but contemporary German records credit the type with 299 confirmed Luftwaffe losses¹ in that campaign.

The type’s defining moment came in the Battle of Britain, where 31 of Fighter Command’s 61 squadrons flew Hurricanes by the end of June 1940. Outnumbering the Spitfire in service, Hurricane squadrons accounted for 55% of the 2,739 German aircraft lost in the battle, against 42% credited to the Spitfire. No. 303 (Polish) Squadron was the highest-scoring Hurricane squadron during the Battle of Britain. Beyond Britain, Hurricanes fought over North Africa and Malta from mid-1940, were flown as “Hurribombers” in the ground-attack role, with six squadrons flying 842 sorties at the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, and served as the RAF’s principal single-seat night fighter through the Blitz of 1941. The Soviet Air Forces and the Royal Canadian Air Force also flew the type in numbers, and smaller export batches reached countries including Belgium, Romania, South Africa, Turkey and Yugoslavia before the war¹.

The Hurricane’s frontline career ended with the war; today it is retired from military service. A small number survive in airworthy condition, among them R4118, the only airworthy Hurricane known to have fought in the Battle of Britain¹.

Safety record

Wikipedia’s account of the Battle of Britain gives the type a strong combat record against bombers: between 10 July and 11 August 1940, RAF fighters attacked 114 German bombers and shot down 80 of them, a 70% destruction ratio, and against Messerschmitt Bf 109 escorts the success rate was 77%, with 54 of 70 engaged shot down¹. No consolidated fleet-wide accident or loss-rate figure comparable to a modern airliner’s safety record is reported for the type; its wartime losses are recorded campaign by campaign rather than as a single statistic.

Similar aircraft

• Supermarine Spitfire: the other RAF fighter that bore the brunt of the Battle of Britain alongside the Hurricane, faster but harder to repair in the field.
• Messerschmitt Bf 109: the Luftwaffe’s main single-seat fighter and the Hurricane’s principal opponent over Britain.