Hawker Sea Fury
The Hawker Sea Fury was a British carrier fighter and fighter-bomber developed by Hawker Aircraft from its Tempest line and first flown, as a naval prototype, in February 1945. It entered Royal Navy service in 1947 as the service's last piston-engined fighter, fought in the Korean War — where a Sea Fury was credited with shooting down a MiG-15 jet — and was widely exported, with about 860 built including Fokker licence production in the Netherlands. Many survive in civilian hands, and modified examples became leading Unlimited-class racers at Reno.
Why It Mattered
The Sea Fury was the last propeller-driven fighter to serve with the Royal Navy. It arrived too late to see action during the Second World War, but Smithsonian Magazine judges that it represented the apogee of fighter technology prior to the jet age, and calls it one of the fastest production single piston-engine aircraft ever built. Australian Aviation rates the type among the post-war era's strongest piston-engined military aircraft, prized for how it performed. Its front-line career was short — it was the Fleet Air Arm's main fighter only until the Sea Hawk arrived in 1953 — but in that time it fought in Korea, and it has outlived its service career by decades.
Design Notes
Hawker began work on the design in 1943, following the first flight of its Tempest, as a Tempest Light Fighter intended for both the RAF and the Royal Navy. The RAF's version was cancelled as the war ended, and development concentrated on the naval aircraft, whose wings were designed to fold for carrier operations. Production Sea Furies were powered by the Bristol Centaurus 18, an 18-cylinder, two-row sleeve-valve radial driving the type's large five-bladed propeller. Armament was four 20 mm Hispano cannon, and the definitive FB.11 also had underwing racks for bombs and rockets, making it a fighter-bomber as well as a fighter.
Operational History
The first Sea Fury prototype, SR661, flew on 21 February 1945, but the type entered operational service only in 1947. Production at Hawker's Kingston factory ran for seven years: 615 Sea Furies were delivered to the Royal Navy, and a further 25 were licence-built in the Netherlands by Fokker. Exports to Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt and West Germany took total production to approximately 860 aircraft, and the type was also operated by Australia, Canada, Burma, Cuba and the Netherlands. In the Korean War, Sea Furies flew strike sorties from British and Australian carriers; 802 Squadron deployed to Korea in early 1952, tasked with attacking railway facilities, and Australia's 808 Squadron rejoined HMAS Sydney for three months in action in Korea. On 9 August 1952 a flight of 802 Squadron Sea Furies was attacked by MiG-15 jets and one MiG was shot down — described as the sole air-to-air victory claimed for a British-built type over a MiG-15 in that war. The victory was credited to the flight leader, Commander Peter Carmichael, but the credit is contested: Vintage Aviation News reports the dispute and the argument that Carmichael's squadmate Brian 'Schmoo' Ellis was the pilot who downed the MiG. Combat use outlasted Korea: Cuban Sea Furies were used during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and on 15 February 1961 a Burmese Sea Fury shot down a Republic of China Air Force PB4Y Privateer near the Thai-Burmese border. Most operators retired the Sea Fury in the late 1950s in favour of jet-propelled aircraft.
Afterlife
Dozens of airframes survived in varying conditions, and many passed into private hands, where their speed made them popular as racers. At Reno, the Sanders family's Sea Furies became fixtures of the Unlimited class: Dreadnought, rebuilt around a four-row, 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major, debuted at the National Championship Air Races in 1983, where it qualified fastest and won Unlimited Gold. Another Sea Fury rebuilt by the family, September Fury, won the Gold Unlimited race at Reno in 1996, and the Sanderses restored other celebrated racers such as Furias. In Britain, the Royal Navy Historic Flight's aircraft served as a working, flying memorial to those who had served in naval aviation; in 2021 the core of the flight was transferred to the charity Navy Wings, the Sea Fury VR930 among the aircraft handed over to keep them airborne. The type's civil life continues: as Australian Aviation notes, some are still flying today in civilian use.