The plan was a knockout punch. Tarrant of Byfleet, Surrey — a firm of timber merchants — would build the largest aircraft in the world, fly it from England to Berlin, and bomb the Kaiser into submission. The aircraft would have three wings to spread the lift, six 450-horsepower Napier Lion engines arranged in tandem pairs, and a 131-foot wingspan that would carry it across continents.

The Tarrant Tabor took off for the first time on 26 May 1919, exactly 107 years ago this week. Its first flight lasted twelve seconds. Both test pilots were killed. The aircraft never flew again.

A timber merchant’s bomber

W. G. Tarrant of Byfleet was, in 1918, a successful timber and building materials supplier. He was also a patriot, and the war was not yet won. Tarrant offered the Air Board his factory’s services to design and build a strategic bomber that could carry the war to Berlin. The Air Board, which had already commissioned the Handley Page V/1500 for the same role, politely declined the design but accepted the offer to subcontract construction.

The aircraft that emerged from Tarrant’s drawing office was an extraordinary thing. It had a 131-foot wingspan, three identical wings stacked vertically, and a fuselage that ran the full length of the middle wing. The empty weight was 24,750 pounds. The all-up weight was meant to be 44,672 pounds — but the empty weight came in roughly 5,000 pounds heavier than designed.

The engine arrangement was the killer. Of the six 450-hp Napier Lion engines, two were mounted on the lower wing in conventional tractor configuration. The other four were paired tractor-pusher on outriggers — two engines mounted on a single nacelle in the gap between the upper and middle wings, well above the centreline of the aircraft.

26 May 1919 — twelve seconds

Captain F. G. Dunn was a senior test pilot at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. His co-pilot, Captain P. T. Rawlings, was an experienced bomber pilot just back from France. They took the Tabor for its first taxi runs on 25 May 1919. The next day, they attempted the first flight.

Their procedure was to apply power gradually. Dunn opened the throttles on the two lower-wing engines first to begin the take-off roll. The aircraft accelerated. With the tail still on the ground, he advanced the four upper-wing throttles to full power. The thrust line of those four engines was approximately twelve feet above the aircraft’s centre of gravity. The nose-down pitching moment they produced exceeded what the elevators could counteract.

What the Tabor taught aviation

The crash investigation, published in 1920, identified the cause unambiguously: the thrust line of the upper engines was too far above the aircraft’s centre of gravity. Modern thrust-axis analysis — the geometric relationship between an engine’s thrust vector and an aircraft’s centre of mass — became a standard part of aircraft certification largely because of the Tabor accident. Every multi-engine aircraft built afterwards was designed with thrust lines as close to the centre of gravity as possible.

The Tabor itself was the end of a brief, glorious, mostly-doomed era of giant multi-engine biplanes and triplanes. The Caproni Ca.4, the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets, the Handley Page V/1500 and the Tabor were all attempts to do strategic bombing before the technology really existed. None survived the 1920s. The next time a strategic bomber crossed the English Channel from Britain to Germany, it would be a B-17 from a USAAF base in 1942 — three decades, two wars, and an entire era of metal monoplane construction later.

Tarrant the firm closed its aviation division after the crash and went back to timber. The wreckage was carted off Farnborough in pieces. The British Aviation Board paid the families of the two dead pilots and quietly stopped commissioning aircraft from civilian timber merchants. The Tabor remains, in 2026, one of the most spectacular single-flight disasters in aviation history — and the lesson it taught was so important that no other aircraft was ever lost the same way.

Sources: Royal Aircraft Establishment, Imperial War Museum, Air Ministry archives.