Britain's second jet fighter was, in part, made of wood. It had two tail booms instead of one fuselage, an engine that sat behind the pilot like a barrel, and a plywood nose that traced its ancestry straight back to the Mosquito. It looked improvised. It was anything but.

The de Havilland Vampire collected firsts the way other aircraft collect flying hours: the first jet to land on and take off from an aircraft carrier, the first jet to cross the Atlantic, and one of the most widely exported fighters of the early jet age. And it soldiered on, in one small country, for nearly half a century.

Wood, and a barrel of thrust

The Vampire's prototype first flew on 20 September 1943, only months behind Britain's first jet, the Gloster Meteor. Where the Meteor carried two engines, the Vampire made do with one — Frank Halford's Goblin, a robust centrifugal-flow turbojet that Volo magazine would later call among the most reliable of its kind.

To keep the single short jet pipe efficient, de Havilland split the tail into twin booms and packed the pilot and engine into a stubby central pod. The forward fuselage was moulded plywood — balsa sandwiched in birch — a technique the company had perfected on the wooden Mosquito. It was light, strong, and entirely unfashionable in an age of aluminium.

The first jet to touch a carrier deck

On 3 December 1945, test pilot Eric "Winkle" Brown flew a hooked Sea Vampire onto the deck of HMS Ocean off the Isle of Wight — the first time a pure-jet aircraft had ever landed on, and taken off from, an aircraft carrier. It was a landmark moment, and it happened nine months before the U.S. Navy managed the same feat.

Records, and an ocean crossed

The Vampire kept setting marks. In March 1948, John Cunningham took one to 59,446 ft (18,119 m), a world altitude record. That July, six Vampire F.3s of No. 54 Squadron hopped across the North Atlantic via Scotland, Iceland and Greenland — the first jet aircraft to make the crossing. For a fighter partly built of plywood, it was a remarkable run of achievements.

The Swiss connection — and a long goodbye

Around 31 air forces flew the Vampire, and roughly a quarter of all airframes were built under licence abroad. Switzerland was among the most devoted operators: its Vampires, assembled and maintained locally, remained in front-line service into 1990 — making the Swiss the last nation to fly the type operationally, decades after the RAF had moved on.

Night-fighter and two-seat trainer versions kept the design useful long after it was outclassed as a day fighter. In the end the Vampire's greatest legacy was not speed or firepower but reach: it introduced dozens of air forces — and thousands of pilots — to the jet age, and did it with a wooden nose and quiet, forgiving manners.

Sources: Wikipedia; RAF Museum; Vulcan to the Sky Trust (Eric Brown interview); Swiss Air Force histories.