Finnish Hurricane

[TomZ]

VL Pyörremyrsky (Hurricane)



The design of the Pyörremyrsky was started in 1942 with the aim of creating a fighter aircraft that was at least of the level of the Me-109 but could be built in Finland.



The first flight was early in 1944 and the aircraft proved very manoeuvrable and could out-climb the Me-109G. The Finnish Air Force ordered 120 aircraft and the first were delivered in December 1944. The fighter was very successful against the Soviet fighters in the Spring 1945 offensive and played a big role in attaining air superiority for Finland over the front.



The Pyörremyrsky stayed in service with the Finnish Air Force until 1948 when the last aircraft was replaced by the Pääsky (Swallow) a license built Me-262 jet fighter.

Kit: Omega Models 1/72 resin

TomZ

[stevehed]

I like it. I know I'm being influenced by the upgraded Morane 406 but it has a locally improved look about it. It's probably the wider undercarriage that does it. The name made me think of a Benz engine Hurricane.

[perttime]

In real life, only one prototype was completed, and it flew as described.

My photo:



------
I think google translate caught you on the "Swallow". The bird species swallow would be "Pääsky". "Niellä" refers to the act of swallowing, as in "Swallowing is an important part of eating and drinking."

[TomZ]

I think google translate caught you on the "Swallow". The bird species swallow would be "Pääsky". "Niellä" refers to the act of swallowing, as in "Swallowing is an important part of eating and drinking."

Corrected, thanks!

TomZ

[Tophe]

Beautiful model! (and beautiful source)

[comrade harps]

Noice 

[PR19_Kit]

One smart looking aeroplane, both the real thing and the model. 

Why did they only build one? It looks a real winner!

[TomZ]

Why did they only build one? It looks a real winner!

The war was over by the time it flew. Real first flight date was November 1945. In my back story, I moved it up "a little".

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VL_Py%C3%B6rremyrsky


TomZ

[Captain Canada]

Never heard of it. Neat looking machine and build ! Glad the one survived as well.

[NARSES2]

Always had a liking for this type, I think it's something to do with the canopy ? And you've done a nice job of it Tom. Omega kits can be tricky.

I didn't realise the one that had been built was still around in a museum. Thanks for that info Pertime 

[perttime]

Why did they only build one? It looks a real winner!

The war was over by the time it flew. Real first flight date was November 1945. In my back story, I moved it up "a little".

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VL_Py%C3%B6rremyrsky

It also took a while to finish just the one because everybody who could work on an airplane was focusing on keeping the existing ones fighting.

One or another of the British historical aviation magazines mentioned recently, that (during BoB?) it took much fewer man-hours to repair an aircraft, than to build a new one.

[perttime]

Always had a liking for this type, I think it's something to do with the canopy ? And you've done a nice job of it Tom. Omega kits can be tricky.

I didn't realise the one that had been built was still around in a museum. Thanks for that info Pertime 

It is at https://airforcemuseum.fi/exhibitions/main-exhibition/
(There's a Virtual Museum on the site too, including 360 views from many cockpits)

[NARSES2]

Thankyou 

[Snowtrooper]

One or another of the British historical aviation magazines mentioned recently, that (during BoB?) it took much fewer man-hours to repair an aircraft, than to build a new one.

Surely you meant that it took fewer hours to build one than repair one?

At least, that's what the perfect hindsight tells us of VL's (State Aircraft Factory) operations (according to a thread in a local Facebook group). The man-hours required to refurbish a supposedly flyable DB-3 (as a case example) bought from German war booty stocks (let alone a locally shot down one) to combat-ready condition were much more than those required to build a brand new Blenheim Mk. I (for which the VL already had a licence, experience in building, all the necessary tooling and documentation, etc.). Never mind that without proper manuals, with questionable source of spare parts, and with flight and maintenance crews unfamiliar with a new type, the DB-3's (insert war bounty aircraft here) went into "deep maintenance" after every few flying hours and their operational readiness was nonexistent. Sure, repairing planes that are falling daily into your territory for free sounds enticing, but if it's actually consuming more resources than building new planes you might just be better off salvaging the wrecks for smelting into raw materials. Of course, on the rare occasion when they were operational, DB-3 would have had had three times the bomb load of a Blenheim I, except that a plane that works carries infinitely more bombs than the one that doesn't.

For all of their good will, VL spent far too much time dabbling in projects that either consumed too much resources (salvaging a shot-down plane that was of a yet different type than anything in FAF inventory, so new tooling had to be created and things learned through trial and error) or were beyond their capabilities. Case in point: re-engining the Moranes with captured Klimov engines was supposedly a straightforward project (what with Klimov being a Hispano-Suiza development), yet only three conversions were delivered before the armistice with the Soviet Union. (Compare this to Soviets re-engining P-40's and allegedly even P-39's with Klimovs as a stopgap modification that was in the air faster than a cargo ships carrying new engines would arrive from the US.) Or wasting resources on certain dead ends - supposedly it was a good idea to make a half-wooden Brewster clone, again with a captured engine, in 1944 (with the end result being a plane with inferior performance to D.XXI's even; yes, I know, metal shortage was a real problem, but still).

Had these resources been used towards projects with actual potential, ie. getting the problems with Myrsky solved (and maybe producing more of them, since it actually outperformed all the Finnish fighters bar the Bf 109G) and getting Pyörremyrsky up and running would have been much more productive in the end. Or maybe instead of trying to refurbish one more type of bomber (in addition to the ten or so already operated) they would have concentrated on re-equipping the existing ones with bomb shackles that could take British, German, or Soviet bombs (most of the time VL was too busy to actually replace the bomb shackles on anything, so if a squadron had run out of stocks of one type of bomb their bombers were useless even if they had a stockpile of ones with "wrong" mounting points).

[Glenn Gilbertson]

A good-looking model & a fascinating thread!