Camm's Ultimate; The Dashing Hawker Sea Fury.
One of my favourite fighters, the handsome Hawker Sea Fury is the latest edition to my site, with two examples photographed during my recent trip to Australia. FB.11 VX730 at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and WG630 at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Nowra. Both of these aircraft are inextricably linked as both were held for preservation by the AWM, with the latter acting as a spares ship for completing VX730. Regarding their individual histories, WG630 saw Royal Navy service, then for many years was used as a wind machine to test building materials with the Experimental Building Station at Ryde, NSW before being taken on by AWM and then the FAA Museum for potential restoration to flying condition. At present it is on display in the museum with a few bits missing. The former airframe is something of a mystery; there is evidence that it might be VX730 as presented in the AWM display hall, but there is the small issue of VX730 being anecdotally scrapped in error and that the aircraft might be either TF925 or VW232, both of which were recorded as scrapped. It is quite likely, then that VX730 is a composite airframe whose identity has been selected owing to its active service aboard the aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney during the Korean War. John Kemister of the AWM goes into the airframe's ambiguous history in a revealing document produced for the museum, where the mystery of its identity is exposed. Anyway, click on the image below to go to the Sea Fury page.
