"You should find our next project a bit of a turn-on," says Tony Ditheridge, boss of Hurricane Restorations, as he points to parts of the tail section from one of the many Hawker Hurricanes dotted around his workshops at Milden, Suffolk. "One day you will be able to fly this one."
As the likelihood of me ever becoming qualified to fly a Hurricane is a close to zero as the ground temperature in this part of Suffolk on this freezing February day, I realise that the idea of a two-seater is being suggested. "Ah, I wondered when somebody was going to build a reproduction of the Persian two-seat Hurricane", I reply, thinking, like virtually everyone else, that the only two-seat Hurricane ever built was the one-off dual-control trainer delivered to the Persian Air Force in 1947.
"No, not at all," counters Tony, producing a black-and-white photograph of an RAF camouflaged two-seater. "Ever seen that?" The picture appeared to show a fairly anonymous encoded Hurricane, but upon closer examination the cockpit canopy seemed slightly longer than usual. "And," adds a beaming Tony Ditheridge, "the one we are rebuilding to look like that is a genuine Battle of Britain survivor!"
The Hurricane in the picture is LB640, which, it transpires, was being operated as a target-tug with the Bell P-39 Airacobra-equipped 346th Fighter Squadron (FS), 350th Fighter Group (FG), United States Army Air Force, at Cafliari in Sardinia in early 1944. During a lull in operations a member of the unit, Charlie Hickman, had the bright idea of converting LB640 into a two-seater, so that non-flying personnel could gain an impression of what it was like to fly in a fighter and ground crews and spare parts could be transported between bases at greater speed. The unit's crew chiefs and carpenters went to work on the Hurricane with sheet-metal saws to cut away one bulkhead and hacksaws to remove several wooden stringers, and mounted a second seat on the side tubing.
The aeroplane was such a hit that two further Hurricanes were converted to two-seaters, flying with the 345th and 347th FSs, all three Hurricanes then flying transport and recreational flights for more than a year. The Hurricane operated by the 345th Sqn was even used to recover a downed Airacobra pilot who had baled out of his machine near the Strait of Conifacio, which separates Sardinia and Corsica, the Hurricane's wide and study undercarriage coming into its own as the aircraft landed on a secluded beach on the coast of Sardinia to effect a rescue.
"When we discovered the history of the two-seaters," says Tony, "we thought it would be fun to share the experience of flying in one of these wonderful aeroplanes, so we tracked down drawings for the Persian two-seater." Obviously, none of the three 350th FG two-seaters have survived, but Hawker Restorations has recently acquired partly-restored Hurricane MkI P3717 from the Hurricane and Aircrew Collection at Hinckley in Leicestershire, and this aeroplane will now be restored as a two-seater. It was recovered from Russia by Jim Pearce in the early 1990's, and although it had been converted to IIA standard before going to Russia it was originally a Brooklands-built MkI. During service with 253 Sqn it was used by Plt Off Michal Samolinski to shoot down a Messerschmitt Bf 110 on August 30, 1940. "So," enthuses Tony, "it's not just any old Hurricane that people will have the opportunity to ride in. It's a genuine Battle of Britain machine with a confirmed kill!"
The two-seater is one of two new Hurricane projects taken on the by company since Melvyn Hiscock reported on the rebuild of Sea Hurricane AE977 at Hawker Restorations last summer (see Hurricane Alert, September 2000 Aeroplane ). A Canadian-built Mk XII, 42025/RCAF 5390, belonging to the US Air Force Museum at Dayton, Ohio, arrived at the company's second workshop at Earls Colne, Essex, at the end of January. This machine was displayed at Dayton during the 1990's, painted in the markings of 71 (Eagle) Sqn, having been restored by RRs Aviation at Hawkings, Texas, in the late 1980's. The USAF Museum wanted the aeroplane to be re-restored and, although it will not be flown, the Hurricane will be rebuilt to airworthy standard by Tony's engineers over an 18 month period.
The revival of the Hurricane is one of the most unexpected and welcome developments in the preservation world over the past few years, with many airframes coming out of the former Soviet Union. The tremendous complexity of rebuilding this robust, mixed-construction, over-engineered machined meant that a specialist company had to be formed, and Hawker Restorations was co-founded by Sir Tim Wallis and Tony Ditheridge, initially to restore, under Chief Engineer and Hurricane expert Paul Mercer, Hurricane Mk P3351 for Sir Tim's Alpine Fighter collection. The company was officially launched on September 28, 1994, and it is difficult to see what future the corroded Hurricane remains recovered from Russia would have faced were it not for the healing hands at such a well capitalised and organised company.
The Hurricane is such a major undertaking, stresses Tony, "that the pure magnitude of the task was at first pretty daunting. It just never seemed to cease, it kept running, job after job after painstaking job; and then finally, well blow me, there it is. It used to take us 44,000hrs but now we've got the Hurricane virtually productionised we're down to about 35,000hrs." As Tony shows me round Milden's extensive stores area, crammed with millions of pounds worth of remanufactured Hurricane parts, he brings home to me the fiddly complexity of the task, saying: "Once you take away the wings and the woodwork you can fit the rest of the airframe into eight tea chests. That gives you some idea of the number of small parts involved in this. You take it apart and wonder where all that work has gone."
The first of the Hawker Restorations Hurricanes to fly was P3351, which was finished in New Zealand and took to the air again in January 2000. "Within 30 months of that flight," says Tony, "we hope to have put four more Hurricanes back in the air, culminating in our own P3717." (There are currently two other Hurricanes being restored to fly at Milden, BW881/G-KAMM for an American owner, and a MkIV for a British-based owner. ) That total of five more flying Hurricanes nearly doubles the number of airworthy examples worldwide.
"I think, with this company, we have changed the perception of the Hurricane as a warbird," says Tony. It is pretty user friendly when compared with most other warbirds, especially when landing and taking off. We extended the strip at Milden from 325yd to 720yd to get Hurricanes in. They are labour-intensive and expensive to rebuild, but there are people happy to spend two or three million pounds on historic racing cars, and for about half of that you can have a Hurricane."
I ask Tony about his first memory of the aeroplane that has come to play such a major part in his life. "The first time I really saw a Hurricane close up was while I was working as a microscope salesman, in India. I saw one displayed on top of a teashop in Hindustan in the early 1970's. Sadly, it was falling to pieces. If you had told me that one day I would be running a company so geared-up toward rebuilding the things, I would have probably told you where to get off!"
Walking past some shelves stacked with rare Hurricane "option extras" (when was the last time you saw a set of Hurricane bomb racks?), Tony showed me through to a workshop where his other company, AJD Engineering, is rebuilding a Russian contemporary of the Hurricane, a Yakovlev Yak-1 recovered from a lake in Russia in 1991. The one, the sole survivor, is owned by the Historic Aircraft Collection. Like the Hurricane, the Yak is of mixed wood and steel-tube construction, but theYak fuselage does not have a huge number of brackets and plates holding it together. It is simply welded. "We could build ten Yaks in the time it takes to do one Hurricane", muses Tony.
"This Yak is an early model with the wooden dorsal fairing behind the cockpit, before they went over to the bubble canopy. To get the contours right we will need to build a 'dog-kennel mould', a similar arrangement to that on the Hurricane."
The Yak-1 was the best Russian fighter of the 1941-43 period, with good manoeuvrability and speed but lacking in firepower. The type was selected for use with the famous Normandie-Niemen (NN) squadron in March 1943, and a Klimov engine, thought to have been fitted to one of the NN Yaks flown back to France after the war, had been found in France and will be installed in this aeroplane. Tony says that the Klimov is due to be rebuilt at Mike Vaisey's Vintech company at Little Gransden, and I ask him who rebuilds the Merlins for the Hurricane projects. "We have been sending them to America, but we are currently doing two Merlins in-house for a couple of Mustangs, so we may start rebuilding them ourselves."
When questioned on what his ultimate Hawker Restorations project would be, Tony says: "Well, if somebody discovered enough Hawker Typhoon parts to work from, that would be fun. Someone has already expressed an interest in doing one, but the heavy casings, particularly those passing under the cockpit to the wings, would be pretty awesome. But when you think of it, we never thought we would have got to the stage we have with the Hurricanes, but you just get on with knocking down problems one by one and eventually get it done."
In the meantime, Sea Hurricane AE977 has been sold to a new (so far undisclosed) owner and, thanks to that lull in the fighting in Sardinia in 1944 and Charlie Hickman's brainwave, the two-seater P3717 is progressing. Meanwhile, for any Hurricane back-seater for whom mere riding is not quite enough, there is still a set of Persian dual-control Hurricane plans sitting on Tony's desk. Anyone interested ?
