Recovering Hurricane V7233: The Fighter That Never Rose Whole

Hurricane V7233 was not pulled intact from the water—it was excavated piece by piece from the mud of The Fleet in Dorset, England. This Battle of Britain documentary follows a Hawker Hurricane Mk I shot down on August 11, 1940, and the decades-long effort to recover what remained. Flying with RAF No. 87 Squadron, Australian pilot John Reynolds Cock fought over the Portland area before a German fighter damaged his aircraft. Wounded in the left hand, Cock bailed out, landed in the sea, and swam to Chesil Beach. He survived; Hurricane V7233 stayed behind. An attempted aircraft recovery in 1983 brought up smaller components but could not lift the bulk of the wreckage. In September 2009, a team working on the television production Dig 1940 took a different approach. They moved an excavator onto a shallow-draft barge, marked the site, and dug through sediment nearly blind. The resulting wreckage recovery yielded an undercarriage leg, a control column, and the Hurricane's distinctive spade grip. Its gun button was found in the Fire position, although that detail cannot establish the exact moment it was last used. Explore why Hurricane V7233 could not be raised as a complete fighter, how excavation replaced conventional lifting, and what its scattered artifacts reveal about one aircraft's final mission. The surviving pieces of Hurricane V7233 tell a remarkable story without pretending the wreck was ever recovered whole. Subscribe for more aviation recovery, rescue, and investigation documentaries.