At first glance the little aircraft looks as though someone assembled it from the wrong box of parts. It has a wing at the front and a wing at the back, a propeller facing the wrong way, and a pilot perched right up in the nose. It looks less like a fighter than an insect — which is rather the point. Miles Aircraft named it the Libellula, Latin for dragonfly.

Behind the oddity was a genuinely clever idea. In 1942, a small British firm believed the tandem-wing layout — two wings, one behind the other — could solve one of the deadliest problems in naval aviation. And rather than ask permission, they simply built the thing in secret, in six weeks flat.

The result was one of the strangest-looking aeroplanes of the Second World War, and one of the most quietly ingenious.

The deadly problem of landing on a carrier

Bringing a fighter down onto a pitching flight deck is one of the hardest things in aviation, and in 1941 the accident rate was frightening. Much of the danger came from simple visibility: a conventional single-engined fighter sat nose-high on approach, its long engine cowling blotting out the deck just when the pilot needed to see it most. Carrier fighters also needed heavy, complex folding wings to fit below decks. Visiting an experimental establishment, George Miles saw a tandem-wing Lysander and had an idea — put a wing at each end, seat the pilot up front, and both problems might vanish at once.

Six weeks, and no permission asked

Rather than submit an unorthodox design to the wartime bureaucracy and wait, Miles simply built a proof-of-concept. The designer Ray Bournon drew up a tiny single-seat wooden aircraft, and with nobody from the Ministry looking over their shoulders, the team finished it in six weeks. It had a high front wing, a swept lower rear wing with fins on the tips, a fixed tricycle undercarriage, and a pusher engine tucked behind the cockpit so the pilot could sit right in the nose.

The chief test pilot said no thanks

When it came time to fly the strange little machine, Miles’s own chief test pilot was distinctly reluctant to climb aboard — so George Miles took it up himself. It was not a gentle introduction. The aircraft was oddly unwilling to leave the ground until Miles discovered a trick.

The first flight, on 1 May 1942, was hair-raising — the M.35 was almost uncontrollable because its centre of gravity was in the wrong place — but Miles wrestled it back down in one piece. Once the aircraft was correctly ballasted, later flights went well, and the tandem-wing idea was proven to work. Years later, the great test pilot Eric “Winkle” Brown would fondly title his account of the machine “The Lovelorn Libellula.”

Brilliant — and unforgiven

Miles submitted a naval-fighter proposal built around the layout. But the company had committed a bureaucratic sin: it had designed and flown the M.35 in secret, without official authority. Rather than reward the initiative, the Ministry of Aircraft Production castigated the firm, and it and the Admiralty rejected the fighter. A genuinely promising idea had run headlong into wounded officialdom.

From fighter to bomber

Undeterred, Miles applied the same thinking to a bomber. The full-size design was never built, but the company constructed a scale flying model, the M.39B, which took to the air on 22 July 1943 and explored the tandem-wing layout at larger size. Like its little brother, it flew — and like its little brother, it led nowhere. The mainstream of aircraft design marched on with a single wing and a tail, and the dragonflies were left as one of aviation’s great what-ifs.

Sources: Wikipedia (Miles M.35 Libellula; Miles M.39B Libellula); Don L. Brown, “Miles Aircraft since 1925” (Putnam, 1970); Tony Buttler, “British Secret Projects”; Eric Brown, “The Lovelorn Libellula”, Air Enthusiast (1977).