Some aircraft are ugly by accident. The Blackburn Blackburn was ugly on purpose — and yes, that really is its name, not a printing error. A deep, slab-sided box of a biplane that looked like a garden shed had learned to fly, it is a perennial contender for the title of ugliest aircraft ever to enter military service. And here is the twist: it was actually rather good at its job.

Because the Royal Navy had not asked Blackburn for a beauty. It had asked for a flying radio room — and that is precisely what it got.

A flying radio room

In the early 1920s the Fleet Air Arm needed a carrier aircraft that could scout ahead of the battle fleet and, crucially, spot the fall of the fleet’s big-gun shells and radio corrections back to the ships. That meant carrying an observer, charts, and a bulky wireless set — and giving them room to work. Blackburn’s designer took the wings and tail from the company’s Dart torpedo bomber and bolted them to a huge new fuselage tall enough to swallow all that equipment. Elegant it was not.

Ugly, and unbothered by it

The three-man crew were stacked into that bluff fuselage: the pilot sat in an open cockpit up above the engine, the navigator worked inside the fuselage, and a gunner sat at the back with a Lewis gun on a swivel mount. A 450-horsepower Napier Lion pulled the whole thing along at a stately 122 mph. It broke the old flying-club maxim that “if it looks right, it is right” — because this looked deeply wrong and worked anyway. For a gallery of aircraft that share its affliction, see our roundup of the strangest and ugliest aircraft ever built.

The eyes of the fleet

The Blackburn first went to sea aboard the carrier HMS Eagle in the Mediterranean in 1923. A more powerful version, the Blackburn II with an uprated Napier Lion, followed, and some airframes were converted into dual-control trainers or fitted with floats. In all, around 62 were built — a respectable run for a specialist 1920s carrier aircraft.

Replaced by something prettier

Aviation was moving fast in the 1920s, and the Blackburn’s eight-year career ended around 1931 when the sleeker Fairey IIIF took over its duties. Blackburn Aircraft would go on to build a whole menagerie of famously awkward machines — and, eventually, the beautiful Blackburn Buccaneer, proof the firm could draw a gorgeous aeroplane when it wanted to.

But the Blackburn Blackburn earns its own strange salute: an aircraft so ugly it became a legend, and so useful the Navy kept it at sea for the better part of a decade.

Sources: Wikipedia; Ed Nash / Military Matters; historyofwar.org; BAE Systems Heritage; Naval Encyclopedia.