Hawker Hunter
The Hawker Hunter is a transonic British jet fighter developed by Hawker Aircraft for the Royal Air Force and first flown in 1951. A single-seat, swept-wing design built around the Rolls-Royce Avon turbojet, it entered service in 1954 as a day interceptor and later served mainly as a fighter-bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, with two-seat trainers alongside. Production, including licence building in Belgium and the Netherlands, reached 1,972 aircraft, and the type served with 21 overseas air forces. Lebanon, the last military operator, retired it in 2014, while contractor-operated Hunters still fly in support roles.
Why It Mattered
The Hunter was the first jet aircraft produced by Hawker that the RAF bought, a transonic swept-wing fighter developed for the Royal Air Force around the new Rolls-Royce Avon turbojet. It entered service in July 1954 as a day interceptor, replacing the Meteor, the Canadair Sabre and the Venom. In September 1953, before the type entered service, Neville Duke flew the modified first prototype to a world air speed record of 727.63 mph. Air & Space Forces Magazine describes it as a mainstay of front-line RAF operations through the 1950s and 1960s. The Hunter went on to serve with 21 overseas air forces, and as faster interceptors displaced it, the type began a second career as the RAF's main ground-attack aircraft.
Design Notes
Sydney Camm designed the P.1067 for Air Ministry Specification F.3/48, which demanded 629 mph at 45,000 ft and a high rate of climb from a cannon-armed day interceptor. The project began with a nose intake and a T-tail, but the intakes were moved into the wing roots to make room for weapons and radar in the nose, and a more conventional tail followed. The result was a conventional all-metal monoplane with a wing swept 35 degrees at the leading edge and a single engine fed through triangular intakes in the wing roots. All four 30 mm ADEN cannon were carried in one detachable gun pack, and with pressurised refuelling the ground crew could turn an aircraft around in seven minutes. Early Avon engines had poor surge margins and suffered compressor stalls, sometimes flameouts, when the cannon fired; cutting the fuel flow during firing, called fuel dipping, was a satisfactory solution. Rolls-Royce's Avon 200 series answered the RAF's need for more thrust, and the 10,000 lbf Avon 203 powered the F.6.
Operational History
The Korean War underlined the RAF's need for new interceptors, and in 1950 the Hunter and the rival Supermarine Swift were both ordered, each as insurance against the other failing. Neville Duke made the P.1067's first flight from Boscombe Down on 20 July 1951. The F.1 entered service in July 1954, the first high-speed jet aircraft with radar and fully powered flying controls to go into widespread RAF service. Its early years were troubled: internal fuel gave an endurance of about an hour, and on 8 February 1956 six of a flight of eight Hunters ran out of fuel and crashed during a diversion, killing one pilot. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, F.5s of Nos. 1 and 34 Squadrons, based at Akrotiri in Cyprus, escorted Canberra bombers over Egypt, though their lack of range kept most Hunters on local air defence. The F.6 was retired from the RAF's day fighter role by 1963, replaced by the much faster Lightning, and many F.6s were converted into FGA.9 ground-attack aircraft, which saw front-line use from 1960 to 1971. In Aden, FGA.9s and FR.10 reconnaissance aircraft were used extensively during the Radfan campaign of 1964, flying air strikes in support of ground forces. Air & Space Forces Magazine records Indian Hunters in action against China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, and Iraqi Hunters in the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars. Two-seat T.7 and T.8 trainers remained in use with the RAF and the Royal Navy until the early 1990s.
Afterlife
Production totalled 1,972 aircraft, manufactured by Hawker Aircraft and its successor Hawker Siddeley and produced under licence overseas. Under a joint Belgian and Dutch programme the type was built under licence in both countries; Belgium's F.4s, for example, comprised 64 aircraft built by SABCA and Avions Fairey in Belgium and 48 built by Fokker in the Netherlands. Alongside new building ran a rebuild trade: surplus aircraft were refurbished for further service abroad, and Hawker bought back Belgian Hunters and rebuilt them for re-export to India and Iraq, among others. The last military operator was Lebanon, which flew the Hunter until 2014, sixty years after the type entered service. Contractors still fly it: in September 2026 AVweb reported that ATAC operated 22 Hunters as adversary aircraft for United States Navy and Marine Corps training, and that the Navy had grounded the fleet after an accident off California, pending investigation. In Britain, Vintage Aviation News reported in March 2025 that Hawker Hunter Aviation operated three Hunters from RAF Leeming, on trials support and aerial threat simulation work.