The Vimy was born from the same idea as the German Gotha and the British Handley Page O/400: that the aeroplane could carry a war beyond the trenches and strike an enemy’s cities and industry directly. By 1917 Britain wanted a bomber that could reach Germany itself. The Air Board issued a specification for a twin-engined heavy bomber, and Vickers — through its designer Reginald Kirshaw “Rex” Pierson — produced the machine originally given the company designation F.B.27 and named “Vimy” after the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge.

The prototype first flew on 30 November 1917, piloted by Captain Gordon Bell. Several prototypes followed, each testing different engines as Vickers searched for a reliable powerplant. Orders were placed for large numbers — the plan was to equip a strategic bombing force for a 1919 campaign against Germany — but building and perfecting so large an aircraft took time.

Why it mattered

The Vimy represented Britain’s second generation of heavy bomber, cleaner and more capable than the pioneering Handley Page O-types it was meant to replace. It embodied the belief, held strongly in 1918, that long-range bombing would be decisive — a belief the aircraft itself would never get the chance to test in war.

Production Vimys were powered by two Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines — water-cooled V-12s of about 360 horsepower each — mounted in nacelles between the biplane wings and driving tractor propellers. The Eagle was one of the outstanding aero-engines of the war, and it gave the Vimy the reliability that its record-breaking flights would depend on. Because the Eagle was in high demand, some prototypes and variants were fitted with alternative engines such as the Hispano-Suiza, Sunbeam Maori, Salmson, Fiat and the American Liberty; production standardised on the Eagle VIII.

Structurally the Vimy was a conventional two-bay biplane of wood and fabric, with a wingspan of about 20.75 m (68 ft) — large, but considerably smaller than the hundred-foot Handley Page O/400. A crew of three was typical: pilot, and two others acting as navigator, gunner and engineer. It was steady and pleasant to fly, if unspectacular; qualities that made it a poor dogfighter but an excellent platform for long, patient journeys.

Top speed was around 160 km/h (about 100 mph) and service ceiling roughly 2,100 m (about 7,000 ft) — figures that vary between sources and with load. These were the numbers of a load-carrier, not a racer.

The Vimy’s most striking feature is a negative one: despite being designed as a bomber, it never dropped a bomb in anger during the war it was built for. The timing was simply against it. The prototype flew in late 1917, but turning a promising prototype into squadron-ready aircraft — sorting engines, fixing teething troubles, tooling up production — took most of 1918.

By the Armistice of 11 November 1918, only a very small number of Vimys had reached the front; accounts commonly say just one or a handful had arrived in France, and none had flown a combat mission. The great strategic-bombing offensive against Germany that the Vimy was meant to spearhead was planned for 1919 and never took place.

This is why the Vimy is such an unusual aircraft historically. Its fame rests almost entirely on what it did after the war, in peacetime, as a long-distance pioneer — and only secondarily on the military career it went on to have in the 1920s. Few famous warplanes are famous for something other than fighting.

The London newspaper the Daily Mail had offered a £10,000 prize for the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. In the spring of 1919 several teams gathered in Newfoundland to try. Vickers entered a modified Vimy, its bomb gear removed and extra fuel tanks fitted, flown by pilot Captain John Alcock and navigator Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown.

They took off from Lester’s Field near St. John’s on the afternoon of 14 June 1919. The crossing was brutal: fog that hid the horizon, a failed electrical generator, ice, and at one point a spin from which Alcock recovered only just above the waves. Brown reportedly had to climb out onto the wings to clear ice from the engine intakes. After roughly sixteen hours in the air they crossed the Irish coast and, spotting what looked like a green field near Clifden in County Galway, put down — only for the “field” to be Derrygimlagh bog. The Vimy tipped onto its nose in the soft ground, but both men climbed out unhurt.

The reward

It was the first non-stop aerial crossing of the Atlantic in history, covering about 1,890 miles in a little under sixteen hours of flying. Alcock and Brown collected the Daily Mail prize and were both knighted by King George V within days. (Exact timings and the flight distance vary slightly between sources.) Tragically, Sir John Alcock was killed in a flying accident in France only six months later.

The Australian government offered a £10,000 prize for the first flight from England to Australia by Australians in a British aircraft, to be completed within 30 days. Brothers Captain Ross Macpherson Smith and Lieutenant Keith Macpherson Smith, with mechanics Sergeants Jim (Wally) Bennett and Wally Shiers, entered a standard Vimy registered G-EAOU — a registration the crew joked stood for “God ‘Elp All Of Us”.

They left Hounslow Heath, west of London, on 12 November 1919 and flew east in stages: across France and Italy, over the Mediterranean to Crete and Cairo, on through Damascus, Baghdad and Persia to Karachi, across India to Calcutta, then Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, before the final island-hops to Timor and the crossing to Darwin. They landed at Darwin on 10 December 1919, inside the time limit, having flown roughly 11,000 miles (about 18,000 km) in some 28 days.

It was the first flight from England to Australia, and one of the epic journeys of early aviation — a route that would later become an arterial airline path. The Smith brothers were both knighted and the crew shared the prize. Their Vimy, G-EAOU, still exists.

The third of the great 1919–20 route-proving flights was the attempt to fly from England to Cape Town. In February 1920 the South African airmen Lieutenant Colonel Pierre van Ryneveld and Squadron Leader Christopher Quintin Brand set off from Brooklands in a Vimy named “Silver Queen”.

Unlike the Atlantic and Australia flights, this one did not end in a Vimy. “Silver Queen” was forced down and wrecked in Egypt, near Wadi Halfa, after an engine problem. The crew continued in a second borrowed Vimy, “Silver Queen II”, which was in turn wrecked on take-off near Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe). Van Ryneveld and Brand finished the journey to Cape Town in a substitute aircraft — a de Havilland D.H.9 — arriving on 20 March 1920. They too were knighted for the achievement.

So while the Vimy’s name is attached to the first England–South Africa flight, strictly speaking no Vimy completed it: the record was finished on a different aeroplane after both Vimys were lost. It is a detail often glossed over, and worth stating plainly.

Away from the headlines, the Vimy did become the standard RAF heavy bomber of the early post-war years — the role it had been designed for, arriving just too late to fight. It equipped home-based bomber squadrons in Britain from 1919 and served overseas, including in Egypt and the Middle East, where the RAF used air power to police its new mandates.

As newer bombers such as the Vickers Virginia arrived, the Vimy was steadily relegated to second-line duties. It found a long and useful afterlife as a training aircraft — particularly for night flying and, notably, as one of the RAF’s early parachute-training aircraft, from which trainee parachutists jumped. In these roles some Vimys soldiered on until around 1929, a decade after the type first flew.

It was an unglamorous career, but a solid one, and it means the Vimy was a familiar sight in British skies throughout the 1920s — not merely a one-off record-breaker but a genuine service aircraft.

The Vimy’s roomy design lent itself to conversion, and Vickers developed a dedicated civil version, the Vimy Commercial, with a much larger, deeper fuselage of monocoque construction able to carry around ten passengers. It first flew in 1919 and saw service with early airlines; a number were exported, including to China.

From the Vimy Commercial the RAF derived the Vernon, generally regarded as the service’s first purpose-built troop-transport aircraft. Vernons flew the desert air-route across Iraq in the early 1920s, carrying troops and mail and even mounting one of the first strategic air-lifts of soldiers. The Vimy family therefore sits at the root of both military and civil air transport in Britain.

A wider family

Taken together — bomber, record-breaker, airliner and transport — the Vimy line shows how directly the heavy aircraft of 1918 fed into the civil aviation and air-transport networks of the 1920s.

No reliable unit price or hourly operating cost survives for the Vimy in a form worth quoting. It was a wartime and early-1920s military aircraft, procured under conditions and accounting utterly unlike those of a modern machine, and the surviving records do not translate into a meaningful “cost per flight hour”.

What can be said is that the Vimy was expensive in the terms that mattered then: it needed two of the scarce, costly Rolls-Royce Eagle engines, a skilled crew and a great deal of fuel. The record flights were underwritten by newspaper and government prize money precisely because such long-distance flying was hugely expensive and risky. Because no Vimy is operated commercially today — the survivors are museum pieces and the airworthy machine is a replica — there is no genuine modern per-hour cost to quote, and any figure presented as one is not grounded in a real, flyable original.

Remarkably for an aircraft of its age, more than one genuine Vimy survives. Alcock and Brown’s actual transatlantic Vimy was preserved and is displayed at the Science Museum in London. The Smith brothers’ England-to-Australia Vimy, G-EAOU, is preserved in a purpose-built memorial hall at Adelaide Airport in South Australia. There is also a full-scale non-flying replica of a Vimy bomber in RAF markings on display in Britain.

On top of the originals, a modern airworthy replica was built in the 1990s by a team led by Peter McMillan and Lang Kidby. This flying Vimy re-created all three of the type’s pioneering routes: England to Australia in 1994, England to South Africa in 1999, and the transatlantic crossing in 2005. After its flying career the replica was retired to Brooklands Museum, on the very site where Vickers built the original Vimys.

Between the two preserved originals and the record-repeating replica, the Vimy is far better represented today than most of its contemporaries — you really can go and stand in front of the aircraft that first crossed the Atlantic.