Hawker's Second Generation of Violent Winds:
A Brief History of the Typhoon and Tempest

by Jason Long

The Air Ministry demanded a weight of firepower some 50% greater than the current generation, but didn't specify the exact armament. Hawker took care to be able to accommodate 20mm cannon with their bulky ammunition drums or a dozen .303 Brownings. Unfortunately the resulting thick wing fatally compromised the Typhoon's high-altitude performance.

The Tornado was the first to fly in October 1939 as its Vulture was more mature than its competitors. The Typhoon followed in February 1940, but the former was canceled when the Vulture-powered Manchester heavy bomber was modified to carry 4 Merlins as the Lancaster since Avro was dissatisfied with the performance and reliability of its engines. Rolls-Royce was hard-pressed to cure its problems, which really weren't all that severe, as it had quite enough to do already with the many improvements of the Merlin and the development of the Griffin engine.

One production Tornado was completed before it was canceled in the early summer of 1941. It had a maximum speed of 402 mph (647 kph) at 21,800 feet (6645 m) and a time to 20,000 feet (6090 m) of 6.9 minutes.

The second prototype Typhoon wasn't delivered until May '41, over a year after the first. The Air Ministry had been insistent that nothing could interfere with the delivery of Hurricanes during 1940 and 1941, understandably so, but that attitude proved extremely short-sighted as Hawker paid little attention to the Typhoon under Ministry pressure. It was supposed to build 15 pre-production aircraft before Gloster began series production to work out the inevitable bugs, but these aircraft were delivered after production deliveries had already commenced! Hawker should have been able to finish the second prototype and the 15 pre-production aircraft in 1940 with minimal impact on Hurricane deliveries.

Gloster began delivery of the first production Typhoons to 56 Squadron in September 1941, but quite a few bugs still had to be worked out. Most of these involved the engine and much time was required to sort out all the problems. Other problems were the accumulation of engine fumes in the cockpit and a tendency for the tail to come off that was eventually traced to a failure of the elevator mass balance bracket. These early aircraft were armed with a dozen .303 caliber Browning machine-guns and were designated Typhoon IA. All aircraft fitted with 4x 20mm cannon were designated as Typhoon IB.

The Typhoon's first large-scale combat over Dieppe further proved that its rearward vision was wholly inadequate as they had been bounced from above and behind three times in the day's flights for the loss of two aircraft, one of which fell to a Canadian Spitfire IX! This was to be problematic as the unusual "car door" design of the cockpit meant that the fuselage structure had to be seriously reworked to incorporate a teardrop sliding canopy and the the necessary modifications of the jigs took quite a while. Easier by far were the substitution of a four-bladed propeller for the original three blade and fairings to enclose the 20mm cannon barrels. These together raised the top speed by about 16 mph (26 kph).

The premature introduction into service and the consequent prolonged and troubled working-up period during most of 1942 provided the Spitfire lobby with much ammunition in their campaign for cancellation of the Typhoon, but its salvation lay in its inability to perform at high altitude when compared to the Spitfire IX as that aircraft had the reverse problem; it couldn't perform well at low altitudes until its engine was later modified for low-altitude combat! The Typhoon's load-carrying ability was not yet proven when the decision was to continue it in production though this would later prove to be its most important role.

As a side note Typhoon partisans might have been forgiven thinking that the Spitfire lobby was taking things a bit far when a number of Typhoons were shot down by Spitfire pilots who confused it with marauding Fw 190 fighter-bombers before they learned to differentiate between the radial-engined German fighter and the inline-engined Typhoon with its massive chin radiator.

Hawker began the design of an entirely new thin wing in 1940 to remedy the Typhoon's main fault, but this was renamed Tempest for some reason since the Centaurus engine originally planned for the Tempest was still in development.

A number of variants were planned for the Tempest, but only one attained service during the war. That was the low-risk Tempest V that used the same engine and massive chin radiator as the Typhoon. The thin wing greatly improved high-altitude performance and had the unexpected benefit of increasing the roll rate from 54 to 80 degrees per second.

The first squadron became operational on the Tempest V in April 1944 though only a few operations were flown over France before the Germans began launching V-1s at England in June. The Tempests were retained in the UK to counter the threat until their transfer to Belgium in September. By the time of their arrival the Luftwaffe was only occasionally seen and they spent most of their time flying ground attack missions which denied them the fame that the Tempest's qualities deserved.

The Tempest I was to have a more advanced version of the Sabre as well as the chin-mounted cooling system moved to the wing roots. The Sabre IV required a lot of development work to be cleared for service use, which wasn't regarded as worthwhile, but the clean and elegant wing root cooling system installation raised the maximum speed by 21 mph (34 kph) over the chin mounting when comparative trials were flown. Surely the wing root system could have been incorporated in the Tempest V without much in the way of delays, but Hawker was under much pressure to get the "thin-wing Typhoon" out the door as soon as possible so as to be able to compete with the latest German fighters.

The Tempest spawned a special model for service in the desert that drew upon the experience with the Tempest I. The Tempest VI incorporated part of the earlier design's cooling system since the necessary tropical filter and enlarged radiator displaced the oil cooler from its normal chin position to the right wing root. Coupled with a more powerful Sabre V engine it was measured at 462 mph (743 kph) on one occasion. But the end of the war and the debate over Britain's role in the Middle East delayed its deployment until the very end of 1946. It was out of squadron service by the end of 1949.

The Tempest II used the Centaurus radial engine originally intended for the Tempest series. Its cooling system owed much to the Fw 190 since the pilot of one had mistaken the Bristol Channel for the English Channel and landed his fighter at a British airfield! Hawker borrowed much from the 190's sleek engine installation which had taken much effort by the Germans before it worked properly.

It was set to go to the Far East with Tiger Force until forestalled by the use of the atomic bomb. It was, however, the only version see post-war combat in the early stages of the Malayan Insurgency. 33 Squadron gave up its last Tempests in 1951 in exchange for the de Havilland Hornet which was better suited for the long-duration mission over heavy jungle with its two Merlins.

The Tempest II equipped both the Pakistani and Indian Air Forces, but Tempest never fired at Tempest as it had long since retired before the first major shooting war between them began.

Performance Data

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