Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The last Battle of Britain Ace has passed.

‘Nother thing the book points out; you were more likely to survive getting shot down in a Hurricane relative to a Spit, this despite the awful gas tank located practically in the pilots lap in the Hurricane. This probly had something to do with the usual opposition.

Hurricanes more often engaged bombers, facing light caliber defensive fire from the front whereas Spits more often faced cannon-armed Bf109’s and werr hit from behind.

Still, the Hurricane was an easier plane to fly, and especially to land. The wide undercarriage also lent itself to rough field conditions.Front visibility too was greater over the sloping nose profile.

Shot-up Hurricanes were easier to return to service due to the old-style fabric and strut construction of the fuselage, indeed, 20mm cannon shells from a Bf109 would often pass right through without exploding.

More’n anything though the Hurricane was faster and easier to produce. Had Sydney Camm the designer not anticipated the demand for an eight gun, retractable undercarriage monoplane back in the 30’s and modified an existing biplane fighter accordingly, England would have been caught short when the war broke out, there were simply not enough Spits yet available in 1939.

Apologies if this is redundant info.

Nope, excellent info. And it makes me glad I was not an air-to-air guy.

The author points out that during the Battle of Britain the Hurricane was just a little bit slower and had a little bit less rate of climb then the versions of Spit and Bf109 than the contemporary versions of the Bf and Spit. IIRC where it did fall off was at higher altitudes where it’s turning radius, among other things degraded. But German bombers formations I believe usually came in at less than 20,000ft. Unlike the Americans over Europe two years later.

Unlike the Bf 109 and Spit, no more significant performance improvements could be wrung out of the Hurricane design, the next generation Hurricane-equivalent being the Hawker Typhoon. Structural problems (the tail would sometimes come off in a dive) delaying the deployment of that aircraft.

Generally overlooked is that the excellent low-altitude flight characteristics of the Hurricane lent itself to ground-attack missions, cannon and bomb-armed Hurricanes performing well in that role in North Africa against Rommel. In fact I think I recall the use of wings with interchangeable armament attachment points was pioneered in the Hurricane Mark II. Likewise, by the summer of ‘44 the Typhoon became the pre-eminent British fighter-bomber.

And hanging thinner Spitfire-type elliptical wings on a Typhoon produced the Hawker Tempest, one of the very best fighters of the war.

What really interests me though is Northern France 41’ -‘42, where the qualitative superiority of both the Bf109F and the FW 190 resulted in the Spitfire getting hammered, for a whole year and a half. This gave rise to a number of Spitfire variants, including a clipped-wing low altitude version that could equal the FW190’s excellent rate of roll.

A puzzle though that the Brits were so far behind in the development of workable drop tanks.

There’s a lot of good videos of Warbirds at airshows, but here’s an excellent one of a Canadian Hurricane 😎