Vickers F.B.25

The Vickers F.B.25 was a British two-seat night fighter prototype built by Vickers during the First World War to attack enemy airships. It grew out of the F.B.23, a pusher biplane fighter that Vickers designed in 1916 to replace its obsolete Gunbus aircraft but abandoned without building an example. The F.B.25 kept the F.B.23 tail and tail boom but had modified wings and a new, unusually wide nacelle seating a pilot and a gunner side by side, with the gunner armed with a single 40 mm Vickers quick-firing gun popularly called the Vickers-Crayford rocket gun. Powered by a 150 horsepower Hispano-Suiza engine, it was completed in the spring of 1917, proved very dangerous with the engine off during official tests at Martlesham Heath, and was condemned as unsuited to night fighting. No more were built and the only example later crashed.