Hawker Hurricane Test Flight

Hawker Hurricane First Flight after 16-year complete restoration. Helmet-cam and chase-plane video. Flown, narrated and produced by Dave Hadfield Full article at Correction to Credits: the person with the cowboy hat in the old photograph of this Hurricane is not Harry Whereatt, it’s Ernie Oakman, a friend and fellow-collector. NOTE: There are many comments about how long it takes to go through the checklists and get the thing airborne. In the B of B the ground crews would have started the engines and done the mag checks etc before sunrise. As soon as the pilots appeared on the airfield they’d go to their aeroplane, talk to the crew about it, check that all the switches and levers were in the right position for a Scramble, and -- very important! -- arrange the parachute and harness “just-so“ for a quick strap-in-and-go; and brief the ground crew about exactly how they were going to coordinate the startup and launch. BUT... I fly many different aircraft types, our ground crew have many different duties, and we have no time-imperative. So we use checklists -- which have been shown many times to reduce the “oh-crap-forgot-that“ mistakes.