On 5 November 1938 three Royal Air Force bombers took off from Ismailia in Egypt and turned east. Two of them landed at Darwin in northern Australia about forty-eight hours later, having flown roughly 7,150 miles without stopping. It was a world distance record, and it was set by an aircraft that most people have never heard of, built out of what looks like a basket.

The Vickers Wellesley was already considered obsolete when the war began a year later. It was also one of the most quietly important British aircraft of the 1930s, because of how it was made.

The bomber that was not supposed to be a monoplane

Specification G.4/31 asked for a general purpose aircraft that could do almost everything: level bombing, army co-operation, dive bombing, reconnaissance, casualty evacuation and torpedo dropping. Vickers offered three answers, and the Air Ministry picked the conventional one — the biplane Type 253 — ordering 150.

Vickers kept working on the monoplane anyway, as a private venture. The Type 256 was so obviously better that the Ministry tore up its own order and converted it to the monoplane instead. That aircraft became the Wellesley.

Barnes Wallis and the basket-weave fuselage

The reason it was better comes down to one man. Barnes Wallis had come to aircraft from airships, and he brought with him an obsession with getting strength out of almost no weight. His answer was geodetic construction: a lattice of light alloy members spiralling in opposing helices around the airframe, so that loads in one member are balanced by the member crossing it, the whole thing covered in fabric.

The result is an airframe that is extraordinarily light for its strength, and extraordinarily hard to kill. Damage one member and the load simply redistributes around the lattice. The Wellesley was the first aircraft built entirely this way to enter service. Wallis then scaled the idea up into the Vickers Wellington, which absorbed astonishing battle damage over Germany and kept flying — and later he applied the same restless engineering mind to the bouncing bomb.

Both aircraft are named after Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington. The Wellesley came first, and it is the one nobody remembers.

Ismailia to Darwin

The record attempt was mounted by the RAF's Long Range Development Unit, using Wellesleys fitted with extra tankage and that already enormous wing. Three set out from Ismailia on 5 November 1938.

Two of the three reached Darwin non-stop, covering something close to 7,158 miles in around 48 hours in the air. Sources differ slightly on the exact distance, but the achievement is not in doubt: it was a world distance record, set by a single-engined fabric-covered bomber that the RAF was already planning to replace.

A useful obsolescence

By September 1939 the Wellesley was plainly out of date for European skies: slow, lightly defended and single-engined at a moment when the RAF was moving to twins. So it went where it was still useful. Wellesleys flew in East Africa, Egypt and the Middle East, operating over terrain where their range mattered more than their speed.

The last operator, 47 Squadron, finally gave up the type in September 1942, by then using it for maritime reconnaissance.

The Wellesley's real legacy is not its combat record, which is modest, or even its distance record, impressive as that was. It is that a British designer proved on this aircraft that you could build an airframe out of a woven metal basket, and that the idea worked well enough to carry Bomber Command through the first half of the war in the Wellington.

Sources: Wikipedia, BAE Systems Heritage, the Barnes Wallis Foundation, HistoryNet, and History of War.