Earlier/better/more Sea Hurricane: pros cons

A lot of Hurricane pilots thought that it was the 33 gallon main wing tanks rather than the tank behind the engine/in front of the instrument panel that was responsible for Hurricane burns. If one, or both, wing tanks were ignited, as soon as the hood was opened the flames were drawn into the cockpit like a blast furnace. The tank behind the engine, which was initially not self sealing, was regarded as far less vulnerable than the wing tanks. Nonetheless an urgent programme was undertaken to treat the smaller tank on all Hurricanes.

If I remember correctly it was only one of the two tanks behind the engine on the Spitfire I and V which got the Linatex treatment, not sure about later Marks and can't check at the moment.

Unfortunately all WW2 era fighters burnt rather well, some just burnt the pilot better than others.

Cheers

Steve

Timppa said:

No self sealing integral tanks. It is said it was impossible to seal them . (I don't buy that btw).

Click to expand...

If not impossible then darn difficult or darn near impossible to repair IF hit. 98% of the rest of WW II aircraft used fuel tanks that could be removed from the aircraft and worked on outside ( or replaced with spare tanks while damaged tanks were repaired and returned to store). If your fuel tank/s ARE the main wing spar (or fore and aft walls are the main spars) then working on bullet holes gets a lot harder. The factory may be able to put a sealant/liner in the space but repairs in the field would call for dismantling the wing spar assembly. Buffalo construction was such that the fuselage sat on top of the wing ( it doesn't look that but is true.) which was built in one piece. Landing gear and a filler plug went under the wing to fill in the space.

British used some combination of horsehair and rubber applied to the outside of the tank areas for sealing on their Buffaloes. . How satisfactory this was and whither it covered ALL surfaces is subject to question. Top and bottom of the spar fuel tanks were the wing skins I believe. Putting a 'coating' on the outside spar surfaces (front and rear ) requires getting access to the interior of the wing, as does coating the solid ribs that formed the ends of the tank. Doable with a lot of work. Not sure what applying a strip of rubberized horse hair to the top and bottom of the wing would do the drag?

Perhaps there was a layer metal bridging the front and rear spar that was not the Wing surface? but then how much room ws there for the sealing material?

stona said:

Comparing all up weights of different types on launch is not relevant. The Fulmar was intended to take off (from a carrier deck) at that weight. The Hurricane with full fuel, ammunition and the addition of catapult spools and drop tanks would be in an overloaded state. It was designed to take off from grass aerodromes.
Whilst I don't deny the possibility that the tanks were used, I've not found any evidence for their use. I'd be interested to establish with certainty whether they were used, or not

Most launches is still not many. As far as I can tell CAM ship Hurricanes flew nine combat sorties in their period of operation. I know of one pilot who made it to an airfield in Russia 'on fumes' rather than ditching or abandoning his aircraft. I still haven't found the total number of launches, but it was very low.
If anyone has a copy of Barker's old Hurricat book it probably has the answer. Mine seems to have gone AWOL

Cheers

Steve

Click to expand...

HH1/IIs flew off of carriers to Malta and elsewhere with 2 x 45IG tanks. Assuming that the external tanks are stressed for catapult launching the HSH1A had sufficient power and lift to do the rest.

Timppa said:

No self sealing integral tanks. It is said it was impossible to seal them . (I don't buy that btw)
Still better than Hurricane/Spitfire main tanks, that roasted pilots when hit.

Click to expand...

The F2A-3 had 80USG SS tanks, with the other tanks being unprotected. The drawback was another increase in weight which the LG couldn't really handle.

Thank you, the F2A-3 had a total of 5 fuel tanks. One 40 gallon in the belly, one 20 gallon in the leading edge of each wing. These three tanks were self sealing. The two original 80 gallon tanks, one on each side in the wing spar were not made self sealing. One tank was kept in normal use because it had the fuel reserve outlet and piping and the the fuel return inlet and piping and keeping the original set up made for fewer changes. the other tank was "kept" (you couldn't really get rid of it) but the fuel filler was normally sealed and was only filled under orders of the squadron commander or air group commander.
Normal fuel capacity was thus the same 160 gallons it had always been except 1/2 was carried in protected tanks and 80 gallons extra could be carried in overload condition.

Fuel system weight went from 27.6lbs (weight of pipes and fittings, weight of integral tanks is counted in the structure) on a Finnish 239 to 289lbs on the F2A-3. (weight of new tanks, pipes and fittings).

Hard to believe either Brewster or the Navy would had accepted a 260lb weight increase in empty weight if there had been a decent way to seal the original fuel tanks. Or the rather bizarre arrangement where the "reserve" fuel (25 gallons) was in an unprotected tank.

BTW The Brewster's original tanks were in the 'center' section of the wing, only few inches between them if diagrams are to be believed. Rear spar/back of tank was about even with the rudder pedals and depending on rugged construction to prevent blowing fire back into the cockpit.

RCAFson said:

HH1/IIs flew off of carriers to Malta and elsewhere with 2 x 45IG tanks. Assuming that the external tanks are stressed for catapult launching the HSH1A had sufficient power and lift to do the rest.

Click to expand...

Yes they did but my argument is essentially this. The Hurricane I fuel system did not allow for auxiliary or drop tanks. The Hurricanes initially converted to IA specifications like those to be used from CAM ships were all Hurricane Is and underwent a fairly simple conversion amounting to the fixing of catapult spools, a head rest and in some cases a few (5) hinged access panels to allow a supporting structure (not the catapult) to be fitted to the two wing spars (4 panels) and fuselage (1 panel). There is no evidence that I have found that the fuel system was modified at this time. CAM ship Hurricanes were not expected to need range and the standard operating procedure was for the aircraft to be abandoned after launch. Only 35 ships were converted so the vast majority of conversions never found their way onto a CAM ship. Most found there way onto the various small carriers that entered service and the CAM ships were phased out. At this point many of the IAs underwent substantial modifications to stress them for carrier landings, fit the A frame and in many cases remove the catapult spools. This seems a much more likely time to make modifications to the fuel system, not least because increased range for carrier operated aircraft which are expected to return to the carrier is now an important advantage.
Again, I don't know that CAM ship Hurricanes never operated with drop tanks but I've never seen any evidence that they did and I don't see an operational necessity for them to have been so equipped.
I shall search for that Hurricat book over the weekend. It may have some useful information, particularly regarding the number of CAM ship Hurricanes actually launched. If that number remains low or in single figures I'd bet that none carried any auxiliary fuel.
Even those IBs used during Pedestal don't seem to have been routinely fitted with auxiliary/drop tanks. None of the pictures of Victorious' Hurricanes, taken at this time, show tanks.
Hurricane Is could be fitted with tanks, the first few to arrive on Malta had flown down through France.I have a picture of one which had a landing accident at Marignane (Marseilles) on 8th June 1940 and it clearly still has ferry tanks attached. The remaining Hurricanes continued to Tunisia where problems with 'auxiliary fuel pumps' were reported.
An aircraft from the second delivery was photographed standing on its nose at Ussel on 18th June 1940 and also has ferry tanks attached. Interestingly, even this early, it also has a Vokes filter fitted.
The early deliveries by sea may not have required any extra fuel. For example the 'Operation Hurry' delivery was launched from Argus' just just 380 miles from Luqua which should have been well within range. Nonetheless one Hurricane (Sgt. Robinson) ran out of fuel and crash landed. Robinson blamed a faulty fuel gauge. These were all tropicalised aircraft and could have carried auxiliary tanks anyway.
Cheers
Steve

Shortround6 said:

If not impossible then darn difficult or darn near impossible to repair IF hit. 98% of the rest of WW II aircraft used fuel tanks that could be removed from the aircraft and worked on outside ( or replaced with spare tanks while damaged tanks were repaired and returned to store).

Click to expand...

Actually I was thinking inserting rubber bladder tanks inside the integral fuel cells.
Nitpickers say it is not integral any more. Yes it is not, but it is now protected.
I wonder why Vought engineers voluntarily cut the internal fuel capacity of the F4U from 361 to 237 US gallons by simply omitting this space.

Assuming you can get the bladder inside the wing spar box and get the ribs and top and bottom skins on without damaging the fuel bladder (blind riveting?) at the factory you have a major repair problem.
unprotected tank takes a simple bullet hit. Repair can/might be a patch or patches on the entry and exit holes. A piece of sheet metal, some sealant and a few rivets and you are done.
A hole in the fuel bladder may (worst case) require taking the wing out of the plane. Opening a big enough hole in the top or bottom to get the old bladder out and installing the new one. reinstalling the wing skin you took off, and then putting the wing back in the airplane. The Brewster factory lowered the fuselage onto the complete wing with an overhead crane, field repairs might be done differently?

Timppa said:

...
I wonder why Vought engineers voluntarily cut the internal fuel capacity of the F4U from 361 to 237 US gallons by simply omitting this space.

Click to expand...

That was probaby done due the installation of a drop tank, usualy of 175 gals - so there was a small, 'interim' series of Corsairs, that featured both drop tanks and wing tanks. Not long after, Corsair carried 2 drop tanks in the F4F-4 variant (there was also option of one drop tank being self-sealing), and post-war 3 drop tanks were feasible.
Wing tanks were reinstated with Super Corsair, where they were slef-sealing, reduced in capacity.

Apologies for being away and coming to this rather late in the day. The availability of a naval hurricane in 1939 was viable as there was spare capacity in the production. Certainly it wouldn't have been as good as an enhanced hurricane with drop tanks and a more powerful engine but there can be little doubt that it would be more effective than the Sea Gladiator.
With the lessons learnt and fed back into the development who knows what might have been developed, maybe a single seat fighter instead of the two seat Firefly.
The impact on the war would also have been interesting. A Naval Mk 1 Sea Hurricane could easily have made all the difference in the Invasion of Norway where the Luftwaffe were on operating without the support of the Me109 due to the range.

I'm not sure how much excess production capacity existed in 1939. At the outbreak of war the RAF had 280 of the original order on charge, 133 were at maintenance units, training units or test establishments. The remainder of the order for 600, 28 of which had still not been completed, were either already written off, were under repair or had been exported.
In any case as nobody in 1939 at the Admiralty had the slightest interest in the Hurricane in 1938/9 it was never even considered. I find it very unlikely that any production would have been diverted away from the RAF after the Munich crisis, which almost exactly covers the year before the outbreak of the war. It should be remembered that these early production aircraft started life with fabric wings, a Merlin II and a fixed pitch Watts propeller.
Cheers
Steve

The earliest mention that I can find for proposed use of Sea Hurricanes is Jan 1940.

Hawker were producing a number of Hurricanes for export which could have been used for the RN, had the will (and need) been identified. The RAF wouldn't have had to lose any deliveries.
Its one of those questions which we will never know the answer too, if the RN were happy to order Sea Gladiators in 1939 why on earth didn't they try a version of the Hurricane.
I understood the thread to be about the early development/deployment of the Sea Hurricane and the difference it would have made. In my view the difference would have been very significant to early days of the war and the invasion of Norway which as it was almost became a major disaster for Germany. Without control of the air Germany would almost certainly have failed as they certainly didn't control the sea.

IMHO a radiator under mid-fuselage makes a plane a good diver in the case of emergency landing onto water and so is very bad for pilot's health. So probably the FAA wasn't very keen to utilise Hurricane as a carrier fighter at first. Only after combats proved that the RN's reliance on AA as the main defence against air attacks was misplaced and the need of higher performance fighter was driven in Sea Hurricane became a serious option.

Also Bf 110 was usually more or less equal with Hurricane and so the LW had a longer range antidose than Bf 109E to it.

Glider said:

Hawker were producing a number of Hurricanes for export which could have been used for the RN, had the will (and need) been identified. The RAF wouldn't have had to lose any deliveries.

Click to expand...

The Hurricanes exported were diverted from RAF deliveries. It was the refusal to make such diversions which led to Canada initially being refused any Hurricanes when she first asked for them in 1937. Later, around the time of Munich a year later, the Air Ministry was much keener to allow the Canadians to have Hurricanes as the prospect of fully trained Hurricane squadrons available in the Commonwealth was now much more attractive.
Exports to other countries, whilst very small in number, again made a political statement. It was a means to bolster nations threatened by the developing storm clouds, a modern form of St George's Cavalry. It is no accident that the first export order for Yugoslavia came after the Italo-Albanian agreement that made the Yugoslavs suddenly nervous. The next order for South Africa falls into a similar category to the Canadians (none of the seven Hurricanes sent survived to see the beginning of the war). The Romanian order was part of Britain's futile efforts to strengthen the 'Balkan Entente' against increasing German pressure. The unfulfilled Persian and the Turkish orders were both part of Britain's plans to strengthen relations with friendly nations in the eastern Mediterranean in support of her strategic interests. The last minute Belgian and Polish orders surely need no explanation.
The export of these aircraft was made for sound political reasons and I don't see how the Admiralty could have hijacked them for its purposes, even had it wanted them.
Whilst it is true that Hurricane production was good enough that by the spring of 1939 the aircraft were going into training pools and other non front line units, the dividend that this would pay in 1940 should not be underestimated. There were more pilots trained on the type than there otherwise would have been, vital at a time when the OTUs were failing to produce enough replacement pilots.
At the outbreak of war Fighter Command had 16 fully operational Hurricane squadrons. Even when we add the 7 Spitfire squadrons and assorted squadrons of Blenheims, Gladiators etc it was well still well short of Dowding's hoped for 52.
Cheers
Steve

Hawker produced 200 Henleys before ww2 started, those were never used as combat aircraft. There is quite a bit of slack to use in order to bolster the early production of Hurricanes.

Only if you cancel something else. The Air Ministry was happy with the output of Hurricanes in the lead up to the war so why would it want to increase it? If there was one type it wanted more of that was the Spitfire. Had the Admiralty sought some conversions in 1938, certainly before the Munich crisis, it might have been able to get them, at least for assessment. The unavoidable fact is that the Admiralty didn't express any interest in the Hurricane until after the war had started at a time when it had no chance of getting any number offset from new production and away from the RAF. This was still the case two years later. The first truly navalised Sea Hurricane was converted from a Sea Hurricane IA, itself converted from an early Canadian built Hurricane I (X) in March 1941.
Cheers
Steve

stona said:

Only if you cancel something else. The Air Ministry was happy with the output of Hurricanes in the lead up to the war so why would it want to increase it? If there was one type it wanted more of that was the Spitfire. Had the Admiralty sought some conversions in 1938, certainly before the Munich crisis, it might have been able to get them, at least for assessment. The unavoidable fact is that the Admiralty didn't express any interest in the Hurricane until after the war had started ...

Click to expand...

Cancel the Henley, Roc, Sea Gladiator, or a combination
The bolded part says it all - the early Sea Hurricane needs a request from the Admirality, not something technical, in order to happen.

tomo pauk said:

the early Sea Hurricane needs a request from the Admirality, not something technical, in order to happen.

Click to expand...

Well we agree 100% on that. It certainly could have been done. The issues of the Royal Navy's attitude to it's aerial arm have already been discussed. Had some far sighted (for the time) senior and influential officer seen the need for a pure fleet defence fighter and been able to get away from the multi role specifications that the Admiralty kept issuing early enough, then a carrier operated Sea Hurricane would have been a possibility in 1940 but only IF his view had prevailed and IF the Air Ministry could have been convinced to divert some of its premier fighter production away from the RAF and to the RN.
Since historically the Navy didn't see a need for such a fighter, or any fighter until it was very nearly too late, the Fulmar actually did a pretty good job for what it was, it is unlikely that anyone in the Air Ministry would have seen such a need. I am even more confident of the reaction of the RAF/Fighter Command to the proposal that it give up any of its allotted production to the RN. It would have kicked up a stink. The RAF suffered from a serious 'little brother' complex which poisoned its relations with the Army in the prewar and early war years, it could have been much worse with the Senior Service.
Cheers
Steve

Actually it needs the allocation of constant speed propellers (or at the very least 2 pitch propellers).

Aeroplane...Weight​

lb...Airscrew....Take-off run'yds' zero flap...Distance to clear 50 ft ​

Please note that improved propellers affected the ground run to the greatest extent with climb out to 50 ft after wheels left the ground only changing by 14% from least to most. Also of note is that the increase in weight of 434lbs increased the take off run by over 11% using the Rotol prop. Adding several hundred pounds (arresting gear, dingy, etc) to the 2 blade fixed pitch version just makes things worse.
For comparison the Gladiator took 165yds (2 bade prop) to 220 yds (3 blade metal fixed) for a take off run and only 150 yds when using a Mercury VIII engine with 3 blade metal prop.
The fact that the early Hurricanes had fabric covered wings is of no real importance ( SO did the Gladiators) except in regards to dive performance. Better than the Gladiator but not as good as later Hurricanes.

Please note that Bomber Command was getting just about all the "good" propellers until the fall of 1939. Didn't matter how bad the plane actually was, It got at least a two pitch prop, otherwise it wouldn't have made it off the majority of RAF airfields.
Henley was, in theory, the support bomber for the army, A victim of conflicting doctrines. Should the RAF support the Army by strikes near or at the front lines or by deeper strikes or strikes against enemy factories (cutting supplies at the source). Doctrine had shifted back to the deep strikes/factories by the time The Henleys were coming out the factory door. Of course it was also too late for the Army to get new long range artillery at this point, too.
Getting a Sea Hurricane in 1939 or very early 1940 requires right choices ( and few, if any, wrong ones) being made as far back as 1936/ early 1937 as far as doctrine and force structure.
The RAF got a few things right, but it got a lot wrong and doctrine doesn't mean much without proper tactics and training let alone proper aircraft.