Friday, April 12, 2013

Aviation Classics Issue 15

How do you tell the story of a legend, a national icon and one of the most amazing flying machines ever built in a single page? Well, it's difficult. Like the Mosquito issue, this introduction has seen a few drafts to get to this stage. To understand the Hurricane, you have to understand the urgency that created it When the British Government finally admitted that another war in Europe was inevitable, the front line RAF fighters were open cockpit biplanes. Can you imagine the likely outcome of Bf 109Ds against Demons, Furys and Gauntlets? It would have been like fish in a barrel. So a huge expansion and rearmament programme began, to swell the ranks of the armed forces not just in size, but in capability, through more modern equipment. Two designs were chosen as the new single seat fighters for the RAF. These were the Supermarine Spitfire, which became the most famous British fighter of the Second World War, and the Hawker Hurricane. The Hawker Hurricane was an amazing aircraft. It was cheap, easy to build and incredibly tough. It was built using the same methods as earlier biplane designs and had originally been known as the 'Monoplane Fury'.

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