Happy Birthday to Hurricane Queen, Engineer Elsie Macgill

During World War II, millions of women flooded the workforce to produce materials needed for war effort. Hundreds of thousands more served in the Armed Forces of Allied Nations. But a woman, born 120 years ago today, not only worked in a factory that built fighter planes – ran.

Elizabeth (also called Elsie) Macgill was born on March 27, 1905 in a rather unusual family for time. Her father was a Vancouver migration lawyer, who was quite normal – but her mother was a journalist and lawyer who was much less characteristic (Helen Macgill will later become the first woman appointed as a judge in British Colombia). So it was no surprise for the Macgills when their youngest daughter Elizabeth became an engineer (though her classmates and teachers at the University of Toronto were a little shock at the beginning, since they never saw a woman who took their feet into their engineering room before.

But even Macgills would probably not be able to predict that a comic book could one day hit their daughter a queen of fighter aircraft at the fiery height of a world war.

Hurricane

At the end of 1940 and early 1941, German Air Force planes, or Luftwaffe, found bombs in London and other cities in the United Kingdom. Technically, Nazi bombers target ports, airports and factories, but in fact killed more than 23,000 citizens and injured 32,000 more in the second half of 1940 during the British battle.

The United Kingdom sent Squadron of Fighter Air Air to combat German bombers and most of the country’s defense was based on two aircraft: Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire. With a 19mm machine gun quartet and 1,185 hp Rolls-Royce Merlin XX V-12 engine, the hurricane was a fighter to be taken into account. On a flat flight, it could reach a maximum speed of 340 miles per hour and could fly up to 36,000 feet (about the altitude of the most modern commercial aircraft). And in an aerial dog, the hurricane could be maneuvered with the toe-to-toe with the Messerschimidt BF 109 in Germany.

“If you saw a 109 in your tail and you didn’t shoot you at this point. You put a full throttle, a slim stadium, a full left rudder, a full left stick and a full stick. G Spiral dive, “the hurricane pilot recalled decades later at Alec Bailey’s 1987 book Merlin in perspective: the years of battle. “But you would get out of the bottom with No 109 in your tail and your plane intact.”

And throughout the Atlantic, in a Canadian car and a foundation of Fort William, Ontario, the engineer responsible for the Hawker Hurricanes building for the war effort was Elsie Macgill.

Cancar, with Macgill as head of aeronautical engineering, began working for hurricanes in 1938 with a private contract from Hawker aircraft. The company’s leadership realized that the war in Europe was threatening and wanted to prepare. In this case, the preparation for war meant shipping plans, component samples and airplane prototypes at the Cancar plant in Fort William late in 1938.

During the early years of the war, it was Macgill’s work to take a 500 -year -old Pacific Factory and escalating it in a function of 4,500 employees, everyone is working frenzied. It had to redesign and adjust the factory tools to build a whole new aircraft (one with more than 25,000 individual parts) to very expensive standards. Until 1943, Macgill has personally overseen the construction of 1,451 Hawker Hurricane fighters for the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force: more than a tenth of all the hurricanes built during the war.

Its fighters threw in every major theater of the war, from the islands of the tropical Pacific to the cold skies of northern Europe (where the lives of pilots depend on the modifications of cold weather, Macgill herself had designed, such as the systems for the elimination of the wings and the wings of snow).

And then they made their queen: A 1942 issue of the educational comic book Comic book The compiled engineer Elsie Macgill “Queen of the Hurricane”.

After the war, Macgill opened its own Aeronautical Engineering Consulting Company, where it focused on international security regulations for commercial aircraft. She also threw herself on Headlong to support equal rights for women in Canada.