The Sea Fury’s war began in October 1950 when HMS Theseus arrived off Korea with 807 Squadron. Over the next three years Sea Fury squadrons rotated through Theseus, Glory, Ocean and the Australian carrier HMAS Sydney, flying armed reconnaissance, close support and interdiction missions from the Yellow Sea. Their usual loads were 3-inch rockets or 500 lb and 1,000 lb bombs plus four 20 mm cannon, and their targets were bridges, rail lines, junks, gun positions and troops. Losses to ground fire were steady, because the work was done low and slow over heavily defended country.

The famous day came on 9 August 1952. A flight of Sea Furies from 802 Squadron on HMS Ocean, led by Lieutenant Peter Carmichael, was jumped by MiG-15s and one of the jets went down. The kill was credited to Carmichael and made him famous, although later accounts suggest that his wingman, Sub-Lieutenant Brian Ellis, may have fired the decisive shots. Either way, it was one of the very few occasions when a piston-engined fighter was credited with destroying a jet in air combat.

The Sea Fury was a strong export success for a piston fighter built so late. The Netherlands bought them for its navy and built more under licence; Pakistan took the largest export fleet; Iraq bought land-based Furies; Canada and Australia flew them from their own carriers; Egypt, Burma and Cuba followed, and West Germany used two-seat TT.20s as target tugs.

Cuba’s small fleet, delivered in the late 1950s, saw the most dramatic action. In April 1961, during the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, the few serviceable Sea Furies of Castro’s air force attacked the invasion shipping. Sea Furies flown by pilots including Enrique Carreras and Gustavo Bourzac set the transport Houston on fire with rockets and cannon, and the ammunition ship Rio Escondido was sunk in the air attacks. Those strikes did much to doom the landing.

The two-seat T.20 trainer, with a second cockpit behind the first under a separate canopy, was built for the Navy and later used as a target tug.

Their speed made them natural air racers. At Reno several Sea Furies have been fitted with American radials in place of the Centaurus, Dreadnought famously with a Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major; the best-known racers include “Dreadnought” and “Furias”. In Britain, Navy Wings keeps the Fleet Air Arm’s Sea Fury heritage alive with aircraft such as FB.11 VR930.

• Fury prototypes: land-based RAF fighter; first flight 1 September 1944; cancelled in 1945, though export Furies were later built for Iraq and Pakistan.
• Sea Fury F.X: first naval fighter version, 50 built.
• Sea Fury FB.11: main fighter-bomber, 565 for the Fleet Air Arm plus export aircraft.
• Sea Fury T.20: two-seat trainer.
• Sea Fury TT.20: target-tug conversions, including aircraft used in West Germany from the late 1950s.

No reliable official cost per flight hour for the Sea Fury in naval service has been published. For modern civil owners the expense is dominated by the engine: the Centaurus is a complex sleeve-valve radial with few specialists left, which is why some owners have re-engined their aircraft with American radials. The figure above is an order-of-magnitude estimate for a large-radial warbird, not a published number.