HURRICANE
The backbone of the Battle of Britain
Although its legacy exists in the shadow of its RAF cohort, the Supermarine Spitfire, the Hawker Hurricane was the workhorse of Fighter Command early in World War II. At the beginning of the Battle of Britain, in late summer 1940, half the squadrons of Fighter Command were equipped with Hurricanes, while only 20 were flying the Spitfire. The remainder were assigned the inferior and vulnerable Boulton Paul Defiant.
The Hurricane also wrote heroic chapters in the aerial defence of the island of Malta in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, and on the European continent, as the Nazi war machine invaded France and the Low Countries and the British Expeditionary Force required tactical air support. Throughout the war the Hurricane was also the mainstay of Commonwealth air forces in the Far East.
The first operational monoplane RAF fighter, the Hurricane was also the first such aircraft to exceed an airspeed of 480 kilometres per hour (300 miles per hour), tracing its origin to 1933, when work began on the Hawker Fury monoplane powered by a Rolls-royce Goshawk engine. The following year, the Air Ministry issued specifications for a new fighter. A design conference was held a few months later, and the prototype flew on 6 November 1935.
The Hurricane entered service with No. 111 Squadron at Northolt in December 1937, and the aircraft was modified on several occasions,