Most aircraft are designed around an engine. Some are designed around a payload. The Edgley EA-7 Optica is the only certified aircraft in aviation history designed around a view. Every other consideration — speed, range, payload, looks — was sacrificed so that two people could sit inside a glass bubble at the front of the fuselage and look at the ground.

It is the strangest light aircraft Britain ever produced. It is also, oddly, one of the most successful designs at the specific job it was built to do: observation. And it was killed not by its engineering, not by its economics, but by a single accident and a fire at the factory.

A design problem nobody had really solved

In the late 1970s, the police, coast guards, pipeline operators and forest services of the world had a problem. Helicopters were the obvious answer for low-altitude observation, but they were expensive to buy, hideously expensive to operate (about £500 per hour in 1978 money), and noisy enough to ruin any covert observation task. Light fixed-wing aircraft — Cessna 172s, Piper Cherokees — were affordable, but a Cessna has a wing in the way of half of what you want to look at, and an engine in the way of the rest.

John Edgley, a British engineer who had worked on military helicopters at Westland, decided to design the aircraft from the view outward. He put the cockpit at the front in a hemispherical perspex bubble — a deliberate visual reference to a helicopter, intended to make pilots immediately comfortable. He put the engine, propeller and tail behind the cockpit, supported by a single boom. He made the propeller a ducted fan, which reduced noise dramatically — an Optica overhead is, by witness reports, quieter than a heavy lawnmower.

The result looked, and still looks, like a children’s drawing of an aircraft — or, depending on your aesthetic, an enormous flying insect. Pilots loved it on sight. The 270-degree visibility from the cockpit was better than any helicopter. Operating costs were a quarter of equivalent rotorcraft. Loiter capability — the actual point of an observation aircraft — was excellent: an Optica could stay airborne for eight hours.

First customers and quiet success

By 1985, the Optica was in service with the Hampshire Police, the Welsh Constabulary, the Australian state of Victoria police, and a handful of pipeline operators in Texas and Saudi Arabia. Pilots reported that the aircraft was startlingly easy to fly: the ducted-fan engine had relatively benign single-engine-failure behaviour, and the slow-speed handling was forgiving. For the very specific job of “loiter low, look at things, take photographs,” the Optica was simply the best aircraft anyone had ever built.

Then, on 15 May 1985, an Optica operated by Hampshire Police crashed on a low-altitude observation sortie near Ringwood. Both occupants died. The accident investigation eventually attributed the crash to engine failure followed by pilot error, but the small-aircraft press latched onto the event. Orders paused. Then, in 1987, the Edgley factory at Old Sarum airfield burned down, destroying production tooling and most of the in-progress airframes. The company never recovered.

A second life and a third

The Optica design has been resurrected three times. Aerospace company FLS Aerospace bought the design in 1990 and produced six more airframes before going bust. Brooklands Aerospace tried again in 2007 and produced none. As recently as 2017, the Optica certification was bought by a new company — Optica Aviation Group — which intends to restart production in the UK with a modern Rotax engine. Whether the project succeeds this time is an open question.

What is not in question is that the small handful of original Opticas still flying — perhaps twelve worldwide — are in genuinely active commercial use. The Australian Federal Police operated one until 2008. A Texas pipeline survey company kept one airworthy until 2019. The Civil Aviation Authority of the United Kingdom still holds the type certificate. Once a year or so, somebody at Old Warden taxi-runs an Optica on the grass, and a small, devoted crowd shows up to watch.

It is, in the inventory of British aviation, the most distinctive small aircraft ever certified — an honest engineering answer to a real problem, killed by bad luck rather than bad design. The world is poorer for not having more of them.

Sources: FLYER Magazine, Air-Britain Aviation, the UK Civil Aviation Authority type-certificate file, Optica Aviation Group press release.