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Hurricane Fails

The first airworthy Hawker Hurricane warplane offered at auction for 20 years failed to sell today at an auction in Australia. The Hurricane was expected to fetch as much as A$4 million ($3.5 million). Bidding stopped at A$2.4 million, short of the presale low estimate of A$2.8 million.

The fully restored example of the 300-mph fighter that was the mainstay of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain was offered by Bonhams & Goodman in Melbourne. The 1940 World War II plane had been recovered in 1991 from the Murmansk area of Russia, where it had been shot down in 1943, Bonhams said in its catalog.

“We’ll be talking to interested parties over the coming days,” Charlotte Stanes, Bonhams & Goodman’s head of marketing and media, said in a telephone interview.

The wreck of the single-seat fighter was bought by New Zealand-based vintage-warplane enthusiast Tim Wallis in 1992 and took eight years to restore to the colors of No. 73 Squadron. It is one of only 11 Hurricanes in airworthy condition worldwide, the London-based auction house said. More than 50 Spitfires remain operational, including a two-seat example that was sold by Bonhams for 1.7 million pounds ($2.5 million) in London in April.

The U.K.’s Fighter Command deployed 1,715 Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain, where they were assigned mainly to shooting down bombers. Hurricane squadrons outnumbered Spitfire squadrons by 32 to 19, and they accounted for 80 percent of German aircraft destroyed during the first phase of the battle from July 1940 to October 1940, said the Web site of the RAF. Children’s author Roald Dahl was among the aircraft’s wartime pilots.