Sydney Camm

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Sydney Camm bigraphy, stories - Engineers

Sydney Camm : biography

5 August 1893 – 12 March 1966

Sir Sydney Camm, CBE, FRAeS (5 August 189312 March 1966) was an English aeronautical engineer who contributed to many Hawker aircraft designs, from the biplanes of the 1920s to jet fighters. One particularly notable aircraft he designed is the Hawker Hurricane fighter.

Aviation career

He started as a carpenter’s apprentice and joined the Martinsyde aircraft company.

Camm joined the Hawker Aircraft Company (later Hawker Siddeley) at Kingston upon Thames as a senior draughtsman in 1923, becoming Chief Designer in 1925. He took part in the design of many Hawker aircraft, including the Tomtit, Cygnet (his first Hawker plane), Hornbill, Nimrod, Hart and Fury. He then moved to designing aeroplanes that would become mainstays of the RAF in the Second World War including the Hawker Hurricane, Hawker Typhoon and Hawker Tempest.

Hurricane

With the Hurricane, Sydney Camm moved from the technology of the biplane to contemporary monoplane fighter aircraft. The result was that fighters flew faster, and with the improved engine technology of the time, higher, and could be made more deadly than ever.

"Camm had a one-tracked mind – his aircraft were right, and everybody had to work on them to get them right. If they did not, then there was hell. He was a very difficult man to work for, but you could not have a better aeronautical engineer to work under. […] With regard to his own staff, he did not suffer fools gladly, and at times many of us appeared to be fools. One rarely got into trouble for doing something either in the ideas line, or in the manufacturing line, but woe betide those who did nothing, or who put forward an indeterminate solution."

Working with Camm at Hawker were Sir Frederick Page (later to design the English Electric Lightning), Leslie Appleton (later to design the advanced Fairey Delta 2 and Britain’s first air-to-air missile, the Fairey Fireflash), Stuart Davies (joined Avro in 1936 and later to be chief designer of the Avro Vulcan), Roy Chaplin (became Chief Designer at Hawker in 1957) and Sir Robert Lickley (Chief Project Engineer during the war, and later to be Chief Engineer at Fairey). The Hawker engineer Frank Murdoch was responsible for getting the Hurricane into production in sufficient numbers before the outbreak of the war, after an eye-opening visit to MAN diesel plant in Augsburg in 1936.

A full size Hawker Hurricane replica was placed near the River Thames, Windsor, to honour Sir Sydney Camm’s remarkable aircraft

Typhoon

When the Typhoon’s design first emerged and entered squadron service, pilots became aware that there was elevator flutter and buffetting at high speeds, due to the positioning of the heavy Napier Sabre engine intake very close to the wing root.

The engineering of the aircraft to travel at higher speeds and handle compressibility effects was one of the challenges of the day, but with his small design team of one hundred members at Hawker, Camm managed to solve these problems and make the Typhoon an effective combat weapon even at these speeds. As operational requirements changed, the Typhoon was used more in the role of a fighter-bomber where its low level performance and weapon-carrying capabilities created a legendary performance. It was much used in the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, and the ground-attack aircraft essentially and ruthlessly finished off any German resistance, with most of France being retaken less than two weeks later. The heavy-duty aircraft would take a lot of damage before it could be knocked out of the sky.

Tempest

The lessons learned on the Hawker Typhoon were incorporated in the follow-up to this design, the Hawker Tempest. As soon as the Typhoon entered service, the Air Ministry requested a new design. Camm recommended that they keep the existing design of the Typhoon for the large part, with modifications to the aerofoil. He had also considered the new and powerful Napier Sabre and Bristol Centaurus engines. When the question came as to which engine to use, Camm decided that they would use both. As it happened, the Tempest Mk 5 used the Napier Sabre, while the Tempest Mk 2 used the Bristol Centaurus. The design modifications to be made to the aircraft to switch from one engine type to another were minimal, so much so that there was little assistance needed in ferrying these aircraft all the way to India and Pakistan, in the final days of the conflict.