Warbirds: The story behind Hawker Fury VH-ORN

Airline captain and ex-FA-18 pilot Gus Larard is the proud new owner of Victoria-based Hawker Fury VH-ORN, C/N37534. Rob Fox and James Kightly visit its new home in Wangaratta to witness an early post restoration flight. Here Rob flies with the colourful warbird while James traces the history of this globetrotting and chameleon-schemed fighter.

This Fury will be familiar to many Australians with long memories as the former VH-HFX, however it hasn’t always been what it seemed. It’s played a Focke Wulf in film, worn a bewildering array of mixed colours, and even what it actually is can be misunderstood.

The story goes back to the very start of the Fury’s invention. As is well known, Hawker developed a lighter, more agile version of the Tempest as the Fury, but the RAF, wedded to the new jets and existing equipment, weren’t interested. The Royal Navy, finding early jets not being a good thing on deck were interested, and Hawker developed the Sea Fury for them. As well as naval equipment, including the hook and folding wings, the fuselage was humped to give the pilot a better view.

Hawker were also interested in selling this new machine overseas to earn much needed cash for the UK, and sold numerous Sea Furies as ‘Furies’ with much of the naval equipment removed. However, while these machines were not full Sea Furies, they were also not the same as the prototype Fury either. Technically known as Hawker Furies, in
the 1950s there was no chance they would be confused by the equally appealing prewar
Hawker Fury biplanes, so the new Fury never acquired a differentiating mark, sometimes leading to modern confusion between biplane and this later monoplane machine.

Most of them are, reasonably, known as Sea Furies, and refitted with folding wings and painted in Sea Fury colours, although pedantically that is not correct. A number of these Furies were sold to the then-friendly Iraqi Air Force, and after their retirement, in a major warbird coup, these Furies were acquired, with spares, by Ed Jurist & David Tallichet in 1979 and stored in the USA. Over the following years, numerous Furies and Sea Furies were reconstructed from this treasure trove, and while the identities were clear on the paperwork, there was a fair amount of ‘cherry picking’ of the best parts, meaning that many parts ended up on different aircraft.

Constructor Number 37534, built in 1948 was one of these, and one of the four Furies that were exported to Australia in 1982; one for Guido Zuccoli, the second, our subject, as VH-HFX went to Bruce Andrews in 1985 after the restoration had been completed.
Initially painted in the overall blue scheme of a RAN display machine (a scheme since
copied and modified by numerous other aircraft) it flew briefly as “WE729, and 115 –
NW” before the serial was changed to “WH589”, the other details remaining the same. One of the highlights on the 1980s Australian warbird scene, it was bought by the Hanna’s Old Flying Machine Company and shipped to the UK, where it first flew in the Australian overall blue with Dutch segmented roundels and fin flash – an appealing but inaccurate scheme.

A stalwart of the Old Flying Machine Company and numerous Duxford shows, it was campaigned hard by Mark and father Ray Hanna and on a couple of notable occasions flown by Ray in opposition to Stephen Grey in his Bearcat, offering a real example of the contest at the pinnacle of this naval fighter development. After some time it was repainted into a much more accurate – and eye-catching – version of what was believed to be its original ‘Bagdad Fury’ scheme of Iraqi Air Force colours. These remained for some time, before finally being replaced (briefly) by an accurate Royal Navy scheme, again, confusingly with two different serials - PR772 and VW238.

On a couple of occasions, though, it briefly wore schemes that had watchers puzzled.
The first was when it was painted as a (rather large) Focke Wulf Fw 190. These very odd faux Luftwaffe markings were for the opening scene in a 1994 TV movie Fall from Grace starring Michael York, James Fox and Patsy Kensit. The other mystery scheme was when a set of RAF roundels were applied in early 1999 over the Iraqi desert scheme. This briefly-applied mix, with RAF ‘sand and stone’ being the same as the Iraqi colours, gave a pleasing – although unoriginal – look.

South African business man and tailwheel flying enthusiast John Sayers acquired the
aircraft in 2001, shipping it to South Africa, where it became ZU-SEA, adding to his substantial tailwheel stable, which included a Harvard, Chipmunk, Waco and Beech 17
Staggerwing. At his aircraft workshops near the Lanseria airport, he also has a collection
of ex Ethiopian Air Force aircraft. The collection includes several F-86 Sabres, T-28s,
a T-33, Saab B17s and 2 Fairey Fireflies, one of which is a dual control pilot trainer. In
2000, the Fury adopted another scheme – this time with traditional Korea era stripes.

New owner Gus Larard picks up the story
“I discovered that John might consider parting with the Fury. Whilst on a layover in Johannesburg, John arranged an inspection of ZU-SEA. The aircraft was very clean, and appeared in good flying condition. Taxi tests and a high powered run revealed a very
smooth-running engine. A flight test was offered, but there was the little issue of not having a SA licence or validation on the day! But a deal was struck. Then came the hard part – getting the aircraft from Rand Airport to its new home at Wangaratta, Victoria.

This would not have been possible without the mechanical ingenuity and sheer drive of Murray Griffiths. We had previously packed disassembled the Sea Fury D-CACY into a container in the UK and shipped it to Wang, where Murray is restoring it to fly. The exercise at Rand went a step further, requiring disassembly as well. Suffice to say there were many nay-sayers at Rand. We first ran the engine one last time to flush oil to inhibit as much as possible. It then took three and half days of hard work with multiple challenges, but with plenty of elbow grease and some capable local hands, 37534 ended up in the container.

Safely unpacked in Precision Aerospace Productions hangar at Wangaratta, a full recondition of the aircraft’s systems – hydraulics, air and electrics was undertaken. The
engine and propeller are fortunately in good condition. The airframe needed some tidying
up after the arduous journey, and was repainted back into the familiar RAN FAA blue display scheme. In the longer term, a passenger seat will be installed behind the
pilot’s seat, and the cockpit will be restored from its current modern instrumentation to
original Hawker production standard.

Our thanks to Gus Larard, Murray Griffiths and his team at Precision Aerospace Productions in making this feature possible.

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