Some aeroplanes are admired. A rare few are loved. The Hawker Hunter belongs firmly to the second category, and it has done so since the day it first slipped into the air in 1951. Ask a British pilot of a certain vintage to name the most beautiful jet ever built and you will, more often than not, get a single two-word answer before you have even finished the question.

It is easy to see why. Sydney Camm, the man behind the Hawker Hurricane, gave the Hunter a shape so clean and so obviously right that it still looks fast standing still. But the Hunter is not merely a pretty face bolted onto a fuel tank. It set a world speed record, it flew for more than a dozen air forces, and it pulled off an aerobatic stunt in 1958 that has never been matched and, frankly, probably never will be.

A thoroughbred from a hungry decade

Britain ended the Second World War with a commanding lead in jet propulsion and then, in a fit of peacetime thrift, promptly squandered much of it. The RAF’s first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor, was a straight-winged workhorse rather than a world-beater, and by the late 1940s the service badly needed something modern, swept-winged and quick.

Camm’s answer was the P.1067. First flown on 20 July 1951 by Hawker’s chief test pilot Neville Duke, it was built around the newly minted Rolls-Royce Avon turbojet, a single engine breathing through elegant wing-root intakes. The production Hunter F.1 entered RAF service in July 1954. A handful of marks were fitted with the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire instead, but the RAF standardised on the Avon, and it is the Avon that defines the Hunter’s character.

Armament was serious: four 30 mm ADEN cannon packed into a removable tray beneath the nose, later joined by rockets and bombs on underwing pylons. There was one quirk the aircraft’s admirers learned to love. Firing all four cannon dumped so many spent shell links that Hawker fitted bulged collector pods under the belly to catch them. Somebody noticed a resemblance to a famously curvaceous actress of the day, and the blisters were promptly and permanently nicknamed “Sabrinas.” Even the Hunter’s blemishes were charming.

The red Hunter and a record that lasted three weeks

In September 1953 the Hunter went hunting for glory. A specially modified first prototype, serial WB188, was fitted with a reheated Avon, extra fuel and side-mounted airbrakes, painted a gorgeous high-gloss red and redesignated the sole Hunter Mk 3. On 7 September 1953, Neville Duke threw it down a measured course over the Sussex coast and set a new world air speed record of 727.63 mph.

It was a genuine national event, complete with newsreels and a pilot treated rather like a pop star. The only slightly deflating footnote is that the record stood for less than three weeks before the rival Supermarine Swift snatched it back. No matter. The red Hunter had done its job.

Twenty-two black jets and one very large loop

If the speed record made the Hunter famous, the Black Arrows made it immortal. Formed in 1956 from No. 111 Squadron under Squadron Leader Roger Topp, the team painted their Hunters glossy black and became the star turn of the British air show circuit. Their masterpiece came at the 1958 Farnborough display, where they borrowed aircraft from other squadrons and looped a formation of twenty-two Hunters in a single, perfectly held arc, then barrel-rolled sixteen of them for good measure.

It remains the largest formation loop ever flown, a record unbroken to this day. Reading Topp’s own account of it, you realise just how close to the edge the whole thing was: twenty-two fighters hanging inverted at the top of the loop, each pilot fixed on the aircraft beside him, knowing that a single mistake would be catastrophic.

A fighter for the whole world

The Hunter was never merely a home-front hero. Around 1,972 were built, and roughly half of those were made for export. In all, some 21 overseas air forces flew the type, from Switzerland and Sweden to India, Jordan, Iraq and Chile. It fought, too. Indian Hunters saw hard combat against Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, and in Middle Eastern skies the type traded blows with Mirages and Sabres. One of the era’s most remarkable feats belonged to a Hunter: flying an Iraqi example in 1967, Pakistani pilot Saiful Azam shot down three Israeli aircraft in short order, a reminder that this graceful machine could bite.

What kept it in service so long was not just good looks but genuine competence. The Hunter was tough, cheap to run and easy to maintain, and it evolved gracefully from pure interceptor into the superb FGA.9 ground-attack version on which most exports were based. Astonishingly, the Lebanese Air Force kept its Hunters flying until 2014, sixty years after the type first entered RAF service.

And the handling? Pilots speak of it the way other people speak of a first love: honest, forgiving and delightfully agile. It was, in the phrase repeated down the generations, simply a pilot’s aeroplane.

Seven decades on, a handful of Hunters still fly, their Avons still howling, their silhouettes still turning heads at every air show they grace. Some machines earn their place in history through sheer numbers or brute performance. The Hawker Hunter earned its place by being fast, capable, long-lived and, above all, beautiful. They really do not build them like this any more.

The Black Arrows and their Hunters, 1959.

Sources: Wikipedia (Hawker Hunter; Black Arrows; Neville Duke); Hush-Kit; Dunsfold Airfield History Society; The Aviation Geek Club (Roger Topp); Wikimedia Commons.