A Canadian-built fighter plane from the Second World War — a rare, surviving Hawker Hurricane Mk XIIa that’s been meticulously restored and flies as well today as it did when it rolled off the assembly line 70 years ago — is set to be sold at a British auction in December for up to $2.5 million.
The privately-owned specimen, according to Bonhams specialist Sholto Gilbertson, is one of fewer than 10 airworthy Hurricanes still in existence, and has been a popular attraction in recent years at the Imperial War Museum’s aviation hub in Duxford, England.
While the aircraft wasn’t involved in overseas action, and its “service history has proved elusive,” the auction house states, “it may have protected convoys on the East Coast shoreline from German U-boat activity, or been used as a training aircraft.”
“It’s very rare,” Gilbertson told Postmedia News. “The last airworthy Hurricane publicly offered was sold in Europe in the 1980s.”
The Hurricane has been repainted to appear as one of the Royal Air Force fighter planes deployed during the siege of Malta in 1941. But the aircraft is, in fact, one of about 1,400 manufactured in Canada during the 1939-45 war at the Canadian Car and Foundry assembly plant in Fort William, Ont., today part of Thunder Bay.
While most Hurricanes used during the war were produced in Britain, about 10 per cent were built in Canada under the direction of famed “Queen of the Hurricanes” Elsie MacGill, the CC&F aeronautical engineer who customized the aircraft’s design for Canada’s climate.
As Canada’s war effort ramped up dramatically in the early 1940s, more than 4,500 employees eventually went to work at the Fort William factory, about half of them women.
According to a British database on historical aircraft, the plane to be sold by Bonhams was flown from Royal Canadian Air Force stations in Debert and Dartmouth, N.S., and Bagotville, Que., during the war.
Sold by the RCAF in 1947, the plane was owned for many years by a syndicate of Canadian aircraft enthusiasts before it was acquired by British collectors in 2002. Restored to airworthiness in the late 1980s, in 2005 the plane became the first Hurricane to fly over the Mediterranean Ocean to Malta since the war.
And this past summer, according to Bonhams, it also became the first Hurricane to fly in Russia since the war, “”where it flew in the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Moscow Airshow.”
Tim Schofield, a Bonhams director overseeing December’s sale, said in a statement that the Canadian-built Hurricane “is one of only a handful of these iconic aircraft still flying today.”
The half-tonne Hurricane, with a 12-metre wingspan and measuring almost 10 metres from nose to tail, could achieve a top speed of more than 500 kilometres per hour and had a range of close to 1,500 kilometres.
The Hurricane has been described as the “hero” of the Battle of Britain, during which it accounted for more than half of all enemy aircraft destroyed.