1:48 Hawker Hurricane Mk.I/Sea Hurricane Mk.I

The fighter that got everywhere

The Hurricane tends to stand in the shadow of its more famous contemporary, even though it was precisely this machine that did most of the work in the first years of the war. The construction with a tubular frame and a fabric-covered rear fuselage could be repaired under field conditions, it took a hard landing and it carried heavy armament. It therefore appeared from desert airfields to carrier units and from training centers to overseas settlements.

The scope of the sheet

The machines offered aim at several settings at once. Besides machines of the Royal Air Force there are naval versions with carrier squadrons, one example with a unit intended for launching from the catapult of a merchant ship, another with a Canadian squadron and a machine from the African ferry route, along which reinforcements were moved eastward from the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. Nor is there any lack of an airplane with a Czechoslovak pilot in a Royal Air Force squadron and a machine of a training group in South Africa.

What to watch out for

The naval version differed from the land-based one mainly in its equipment for operation over the sea, but the shape of the airframe stayed the same. Before you choose an option, check the shape of the exhausts and the type of propeller on the kit you have, because they changed during production. Apply the decals onto a gloss base and draw the surplus water off with a cloth from the center toward the edges, or a bubble will stay under the film.

The package holds only the decals; the model itself is obtained separately. With the options selected it is worth studying a period photograph, because unit markings often changed within a single season, and a machine transferred to another unit carried them painted over.