On 9 May 1940, Hawker chief test pilot Philip Lucas looked over his shoulder and saw daylight. The fuselage of the brand-new fighter he was flying had split open just behind his seat. Instead of bailing out, he nursed the crippled prototype back to the ground and was later awarded the George Medal.

That aircraft was the Hawker Typhoon, and the incident set the tone for its early life. Designed by Sydney Camm as a fast, high-altitude interceptor to follow the Hawker Hurricane, it was slow to climb, poisoned its pilots with carbon monoxide, shed its tail in dives and ran on an engine that hated cold mornings. The Royal Air Force seriously considered stopping production.

Four years later the same aircraft was the most feared thing in the Normandy sky for German tank crews. This is the story of how a failed interceptor became one of the great ground-attack aircraft of the Second World War.

A fighter built around a monster engine

Camm started sketching a Hurricane successor even as Hurricane production began in 1937. The Air Ministry's Specification F.18/37 asked for at least 400 mph at 15,000 feet and a heavy gun armament. Hawker answered with two near-identical airframes: the Tornado, built around the Rolls-Royce Vulture, and the Typhoon, built around the Napier Sabre.

The Sabre was extraordinary on paper. Twenty-four cylinders arranged in an H, sleeve valves instead of poppet valves, and more than 2,000 horsepower. In practice it was late, fragile and hard to start in cold weather, and it burned oil as its sleeve valves wore.

The airframe had its own handicap. Camm gave it a thick wing, strong and roomy for fuel and guns, but draggy at speed. The Typhoon reached 410 mph at 20,000 feet in tests, and its climb and high-altitude performance disappointed. In fast dives it buffeted and changed trim as compressibility set in. That thick wing is why Camm went on to design the thin-winged Typhoon II, which became the Tempest.

Wartime priorities slowed everything further. In May 1940, Lord Beaverbrook ordered industry to concentrate on five other types, and Gloster did not fly the first production Typhoon until 27 May 1941.

Rushed into service, and it showed

In 1941 the Luftwaffe's new Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was outclassing the Spitfire V, and the Typhoon was pushed into service with Nos. 56 and 609 Squadrons that autumn to counter it. Aircraft began to go missing for reasons nobody could explain.

Some of the answers were in the cockpit. Carbon monoxide from the exhausts seeped in. Longer exhaust stubs arrived in November 1941 as Mod 239, yet the Pilot's Notes still warned that "unless Mod. No. 239 has been embodied it is most important that oxygen be used at all times". The fumes were never entirely cured, and Typhoon pilots went on breathing oxygen from engine start to shutdown for the rest of the war.

The tail was worse. In August 1942, Hawker test pilot Ken Seth-Smith was killed when R7692, with just 11 flying hours, broke up during a speed run. Investigators found that the elevator mass-balance bracket had failed, allowing flutter that tore the rear fuselage apart. Mod 286 riveted 20 external reinforcing plates around the joint, and every Typhoon without it was withdrawn and modified between December 1942 and March 1943. Tail failures never stopped entirely: in total, 25 aircraft and 23 pilots were lost to them.

Saved by the Fw 190

What kept the Typhoon alive was the very aircraft it had been rushed out to fight. At low level it was the only RAF fighter fast enough to catch the Fw 190, and through late 1942 and 1943 the Luftwaffe was sending bomb-carrying Fw 190s across the Channel on low-level "tip and run" raids against southern England.

Typhoon pairs flew standing patrols at 500 feet or lower over the south coast to meet them. No. 486 (New Zealand) Squadron alone claimed 20 fighter-bombers and three bombers between October 1942 and July 1943. Roland Beamont of 609 Squadron, who had flown the type as a Hawker production test pilot, had seen its qualities from the start and became one of its strongest advocates.

Its likeness to the Fw 190 brought friendly fire, so Typhoons got white noses and then black-and-white underwing stripes, a forerunner of the D-Day invasion stripes.

British Movietone newsreel from 26 June 1944 introducing the rocket-firing Typhoon, then the RAF's newest weapon over Normandy.

Rockets and the cab rank

By 1943 the RAF needed a ground-attack aircraft more than another pure fighter, and the Typhoon's power made it a natural. Bomb-carrying "Bombphoons" served with No. 181 Squadron from autumn 1942, eventually lifting two 1,000 lb bombs, as much as the light bombers of a few years earlier.

Then came the rocket. In October 1943, No. 181 Squadron flew the first Typhoon rocket attacks with the RP-3, a three-inch rocket with a 60 lb warhead. A Typhoon carried eight of them on rails under its outer wings, on top of its four 20 mm cannon. They were inaccurate and hard to aim, thrown off by range errors, sideslip and crosswind.

By the Normandy landings in June 1944, the Second Tactical Air Force had 18 operational Typhoon squadrons, with nine more in Fighter Command. To bring them onto targets the troops could see, the RAF and the Army developed the "cab rank": RAF radio operators rode with the forward troops, Typhoons orbited overhead on call, and artillery or mortars marked each target with smoke shells.

Mortain and the Falaise Gap

The Typhoon's defining day came on 7 August 1944, when German armour struck west at Mortain in Operation Lüttich, aiming to cut off the American breakout. Typhoon squadrons flew 458 sorties that day, 294 of them against targets around Mortain, while American fighters kept the Luftwaffe away and hit roads behind the front.

The counter-attack stalled. Air Marshal Arthur Coningham, commanding the Second Tactical Air Force, wrote that as the attacks intensified it was "becoming clear that air history was being made", and that many German crews abandoned their tanks and took cover away from them.

Days later the Germans were trapped in the Falaise pocket, which was finally sealed on 21 August 1944. Flight Lieutenant John Colton, a Sherbrooke-born member of the Royal Canadian Air Force flying Typhoons with No. 137 Squadron, arrived in Normandy on 13 August and flew straight into it. He called it "the most disastrous operation I ever flew on", and remembered the cost to the squadron too: diving from 6,000 feet into the flak, the losses were high.

The pocket became a killing ground for men, vehicles and the horses that hauled much of the German army's equipment. Colton flew over it a few days after the fighting.

The numbers that did not add up

Pilots' claims were enormous, and the Army's Operational Research sections went out to count the wrecks. At Mortain, Typhoon pilots claimed 84 tanks destroyed, 35 probably destroyed and 21 damaged. A ground search found the remains of only 43 tanks. Seven had been knocked out by air-launched rockets, two by bombs and 19 by ground anti-tank weapons.

In the Falaise pocket the picture was similar. Of 385 armoured vehicles examined, rockets accounted for 14, or 3.6 percent. German crews had destroyed 148 themselves and abandoned 121 intact, mostly for lack of fuel. Against lorries and cars, the humble 20 mm cannon did far more damage than the rocket: 377 of 1,361 soft-skinned vehicles examined, against six for rockets.

Historian Alfred Price concluded that the rocket's real weapon was fear. Prisoner interrogations showed German tank crews were terrified of rocket attack even though direct hits were rare, and Price argued that physical damage alone could not have halted the Mortain offensive. The bigger effect was on morale, as crews left their tanks and ran for cover.

Independent documentary on the Typhoon pilots' war, made by the grandson of a No. 181 Squadron pilot around the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

One survivor in a museum, one in the jigs

Of 3,317 Typhoons built, two prototypes and 15 production aircraft came from Hawker and 3,300 from Gloster. They vanished almost as fast as they had appeared. By October 1945 the type was out of operational use, and the scrapmen took nearly all of them.

The only complete survivor is MN235, which first flew on 8 February 1944 and never saw combat. It was shipped to the United States for evaluation, had a minor accident after nine hours of flying and went into storage, passing to the Smithsonian in 1949. In 1967 the Smithsonian presented it to the RAF Museum, which gave a Hurricane in exchange, and it has been displayed at Hendon since 1972. After a 2013 repaint in No. 440 Squadron RCAF markings and a loan to Canada, it spent the summer of 2018 in the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight hangar at RAF Coningsby before returning to Hendon that November.

A second Typhoon is coming back, slowly. RB396 joined No. 174 Squadron at the turn of 1945, flew more than 35 combat sorties and was repaired 18 times. On 1 April 1945, flak brought it down near Denekamp in the Netherlands, and its pilot, Flight Lieutenant Chris House, evaded capture. Dutch enthusiasts later saved what was left, and the rear fuselage returned to Britain in 2012.

The Hawker Typhoon Preservation Group, a volunteer charity founded in 2016, is rebuilding it to fly as G-TIFY. The rear fuselage, about 80 percent original, was completed by Airframe Assemblies on the Isle of Wight in October 2024. The group estimates the whole project at £5.5 million to £6.5 million, and in 2024 it said the aircraft could fly by the D-Day anniversary in 2029 if support holds. In 2026 its engineer at the Aircraft Restoration Company is rebuilding the tail three days a week, as fast as donations allow, using parts cut from the wreck of another Typhoon, JP600.

The Hawker Typhoon Preservation Group's 2026 update on the RB396 tail rebuild at the Aircraft Restoration Company.

For an aircraft that nearly failed before it fought, that is a fitting kind of comeback: slow, stubborn and paid for by people who refuse to let it go.

Sources: Wikipedia (Hawker Typhoon; Hawker Typhoon Preservation Group; Falaise pocket), BAE Systems Heritage, Dr Alfred Price in RAF Air Power Review, Royal Canadian Air Force, HistoryNet, Vintage Aviation News, Hawker Typhoon Preservation Group