I flew the Hawker Sea Fury in 1956 (and loved it)

Dave Eagles describes flying the greatest piston-engined fighter ever made

After dicking around with the promblematic Typhoon for some time, Hawker created the superlative Tempest. Giving the Tempest a little wing trim resulted in the most formidable piston-engined fighter ever flown, the superb Sea Fury.

Hawkers spent their first few attempts at a monoplane fighter battling chonky wings and the attendant inefficiency at high speed. Finally getting the thickness right with the Tempest, there was still slightly too much wing. The Fury solved this by taking the same wings and joining the roots on the centreline rather than attaching them to the side of the fuselage. With minimal lifting area comes minimal induced drag – think of it as the F-104 of its day.

“..top marks for agility."

Combined with a very clean fuselage and the sort of attention to surface finish that screams ‘not made in the UK’, the Fury is a slippery beast, as testified to by the relatively low level of airframe modification when used for air racing. The next performance killer to address was weight, which was solved by Hawker’s first use of an all monocoque fuselage, where the outer skin is load-bearing rather than just being fabulously good-looking. Removing the tubular bracing that traditionally provided fuselage strength in their products made the Fury the annoying skinny younger sister of the family with a fantastic power-to-weight ratio. Finally, the drag from engine cooling had to be addressed. Needing a plentiful supply of air over the cylinders, radial engines can suffer from significant drag – a problem most US manufacturers solved by ignoring it and hoping it would go away. Being made of sterner stuff, Hawkers designed a system that optimised air flow into the engine bay. This minimised the amount of high-speed air entering before slowing and expanding it ahead of the cylinder heads. It could now take a leisurely trip around the cooling fins and absorb as much heat as possible. The process was reversed on the now much hotter air, accelerating it out of the cooling flaps either side of the nose alongside the thrust providing exhausts. The result was the finest piston-engined fighter ever made, with only the Bearcat offering credible opposition.

With a max speed of 465 mph (748 km/h) the Sea Fury was among the fastest piston-engined fighters to enter series production. It shot down at least one MiG-15 jet fighter, a Consolidated PB4Y, and two B-26s. It was possible to take the basic airframe even faster – a single Napier Sabre-powered example with around 3,500 hp achieved 485mph (781 km/h), although, unsurprisingly, no one was keen on putting Sabres in a naval aircraft as they had developed a reputation for unreliability.

Former BAe test pilot Dave Eagles has flown some of the greatest aircraft in history. Here he reveals what it was like to fly the ultimate piston-engined fighter, the Hawker Sea Fury.

"I flew the Sea Fury in 1956 after having had 6 months or so on a Firefly Squadron,