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Line Number
First Flight
Model	Hurricane-Mk.2
Status	Preserved
Comments	in 1942 Z2389 was crated up, loaded onto a Russian merchant vessel and shipped to Murmansk in the Soviet Union. At the time lend-Lease aircraft from the US and UK accounted for nearly 12% of total Soviet air power. The convoy left for Murmansk on 21st May, 1942 with 35 vessels, subsequently falling prey to enemy action and loosing seven cargo ships along the way. Z2389 commenced service with the Russian 767th Fighter Aviation Regiment in the inhospitable north Kola Peninsula, to do battle in the bleak, forbidding skies above the Barents Sea. However Z2389 was shot down on 20th June, 1942 during a fierce dogfight with two Messerschmitt Bf 109s and five Bf 110s. Z2389’s pilot, F/Lt Ivan Kalashnikov, survived after crash landing his stricken plane, where it lay for the next fifty years. Like many wrecked aircraft abandoned in the wake of The Second World War, Kalashnikov’s aircraft was ultimately recovered and partially restored in St Petersburg. In 1997, after 55 long years, Hurricane Z2389 returned to the UK, arriving at Brooklands Museum in Surrey on 14th October, 1997 and became the first historic aircraft purchased with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant. Its restoration began in 1999 and the aircraft unveiled on the 75th anniversary of the first flight of a Hurricane, which coincidentally took place at Brooklands in November 1935. Hurricane Mk IIA Z2389, resplendent in the green and brown camouflage colours of RAF Fighter Command, is currently under restoration to taxiing condition at Brooklands Museum near Weybridge, close in proximity to the Supercraft engineering facility in Byfleet. The aircraft is displayed as part of the ‘Brooklands in the Battle of Britain’ exhibition, telling the wartime story of Brooklands as a former Fighter Command base during the tumultuous summer of 1940, including the two air raids on the Brooklands site on the 4th & 6th September 1940. (source: https://www.supercraft.co.uk/news/hurricane_Z2389.htm)
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