Survivors
Because production continued until well after the end of the Second World War and aircraft remained in Royal Navy service until 1955, dozens of airframes have survived in varying levels of condition. A number of Sea Furies were overhauled by Hawker Aircraft at their factory at Blackpool during 1959 and supplied to civil companies in Germany, equipped with target-towing gear for Luftwaffe contract flying. Some of these aircraft survive today. A number of the Furies sold to Iraq were purchased by restorers in the late 1970s and are now also owned and operated by civilians.
Around a dozen heavily modified Sea Furies are raced regularly at the Reno Air Races as of 2009. Most of these replace the original sleeve-valve Centaurus radial with the Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major or the Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone radial engine. These include Dreadnought and Furias, which have had Wasp Major engines installed.
WJ232, the aircraft 'Hoagy' Carmichael flew during the 9 August 1952 action which resulted in him being credited with the destruction of a MiG-15 jet fighter, remains in operation in Australia in its original Royal Navy markings, with civil registration VH-SHF.
Many additional airframes remain as static displays in museums worldwide. One of these ex- RCN WG565 is on display in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It was ferried to Alberta for instructional use in the Alberta Provincial Institute of Technology by Lieutenant Commander Derek Prout. On the 1 April 1958, Flying Officer Lynn Garrison, of the 403 City of Calgary Squadron, RCAF, made the final Canadian military flight for this aircraft type.
Read more about this topic: Hawker Sea Fury
Famous quotes containing the word survivors:
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)