On his first day with No. 92 Squadron in May 1940, a twenty-year-old pilot officer borrowed somebody else’s Spitfire and rolled it on take-off. His name was Trevor Wade. Everybody called him Wimpy, after the hamburger-eating character in Popeye.

Eleven years later he was Hawker’s chief test pilot, holder of the London to Paris record, and the only man who ever flew the Hawker P.1081. On 3 April 1951 the aircraft killed him.

The P.1081 was built for Australia, offered to Australia, and never bought by Australia. Only one existed. This is what happened to both of them.

Australia Needed a Fighter and Needed It Quickly

In 1949 the Royal Australian Air Force went looking for a replacement for two locally built types: the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation’s Mustang and de Havilland Australia’s Vampires.

Several designs were considered, including the Grumman F9F Panther and an unconventional twin-jet all-weather fighter of Australia’s own, the CAC CA-23. Hawker put forward something based on its P.1052 research aircraft: swept wing, swept tail, Rolls-Royce Tay.

Work began on converting the second P.1052 prototype, VX279. The bifurcated tailpipes of the P.1052, which split the exhaust to exit either side of the rear fuselage, were replaced with a single straight-through pipe so that an afterburner could eventually be fitted. The Tay never arrived; the Nene already installed stayed put. Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, fully expecting to build whatever Australia chose, went so far as to allocate the designation CA-24.

Period footage of VX279, the only Hawker P.1081 ever built.

Then Korea Happened

By the middle of 1950 the calculation had changed completely. Australian Mustangs were already in action over Korea and facing the prospect of meeting MiG-15s, which would have been a short and one-sided conversation.

The RAAF did not need a promising prototype. It needed aircraft this year. The P.1081 could not possibly be operational for several years. The North American F-86 Sabre was the obvious answer and was already fighting in Korea, but the USAF had absolute priority and none could be spared for Australia for years either.

So Australia bought the F.8 version of the Meteora Gloster, which was available immediately because the RAF already flew it. Years later CAC did build its own Sabre, re-engined with a Rolls-Royce Avon, and it was a considerably better aircraft than the American original.

In November 1950, correctly reading the room, Hawker stopped work on the P.1081. The prototype went to the Royal Aircraft Establishment for high-speed research.

The Man Flying It

Wade had earned his place in that cockpit several times over.

He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in April 1938 at eighteen. In the Battle of Britain he flew Spitfires with 92 Squadron and was shot up repeatedly: forced down after sharing a Ju 88 in August 1940, escaping the aircraft before it caught fire; forced down again at Lewes in September with the aircraft flipping onto its back; down again at Gravesend in December. He baled out over Exeter one night in July when his fuel ran low, the weather closed in and his radio failed.

A wound during a raid on the Marquise Shell factory in September 1941 ended his combat flying. He became a gunnery instructor, then commanded the Air Fighting Development Unit, and was sent to the United States in early 1945 to test captured Japanese aircraft and get his hands on early jets.

He joined Hawker in October 1947 and was chief test pilot by June 1948. In May 1949 he flew the 221 miles from London to Paris in 21 minutes 28 seconds, an average of 618 mph. That August he won the SBAC Challenge Cup in the P.1040, beating John Cunningham in a Vampire and John Derry in the DH.108, averaging 510 mph with one lap at 584.

He took the P.1081 up for the first time on 19 June 1950, was happy with it, put six hours on it over the next three days and flew it to the Antwerp air display on the 25th. At the SBAC show in September he showed off its roll rate and its speed. When a main wheel refused to come down on one test flight, he landed it anyway without breaking anything.

3 April 1951

In January 1951 Wade was the first British test pilot sent to the United States on an exchange scheme. There he flew the F-86 Sabre and went supersonic in it, which was the sort of thing a chief test pilot needed to have done.

That detail may be why he died. Bill Bedford, another Hawker test pilot, later suggested that Wade tried to take the P.1081 supersonic the way he had learned in the Sabre, in a vertical dive. The Sabre had powered flying controls. The P.1081 did not. Once the aircraft entered that regime there was nothing in the cockpit strong enough to pull it out.

Wade did everything right on the way down. He jettisoned the canopy at 9,000 feet and ejected at 2,000. The seat fired. He simply never separated from it, and was killed on impact near Ringmer in Sussex. He was 31, and left a wife and three children.

Neither the cause of the loss of control nor the failure of the seat was ever established. The aircraft had an ML ejection seat rather than the Martin-Baker type the RAF used, and the difference did not go unnoticed. On 30 April 1951, Percy “Laddie” Lucas, the MP for Brentford and Chiswick and himself a wartime fighter pilot, stood up in the Commons and asked the Minister of Supply what seats were fitted to British aircraft, how they were tested, and whether test pilots were insured.

What It Left Behind

The swept tail did what it was supposed to. It pushed the aircraft’s usable Mach number up into the 0.9 to 0.95 region, well beyond what the P.1052 could manage, and that data went straight into the design of the axial-engined Cacciatore di Hawker.

The Hunter, the aircraft the P.1081 helped make possible, and one of the most successful British jets ever built.

The Hunter first flew on 20 July 1951, three and a half months after Wade died, with Neville Duke at the controls. Nearly two thousand were built and they served with air forces from Switzerland to Singapore for half a century.

Neville Duke and the Hunter prototype WB188, in which he would take the world air speed record in 1953.

That is the honest epitaph for the P.1081. It was not a bad aeroplane and it was not quite a good enough one, it arrived at exactly the wrong moment for the customer it was designed around, and the single example built killed the man who understood it best. What survived was the knowledge, and the knowledge turned into the Hunter.

Sources: The Times obituary, 4 April 1951; Flight, 13 April and 11 May 1951; Francis K. Mason, Hawker Aircraft since 1920; Norman Franks, Dowding’s Eagles; Shores and Williams, Aces High; Imperial War Museum oral history 17826, Bill Bedford; RAAF Museum