Vickers Vellore

The Vickers Vellore was a large biplane freight and mail carrier of the late 1920s, named after the Indian city of Vellore and built in response to Air Ministry specification 34/24 for a civil mail and freight carrier. The Vellore I was a very large single-engined, two-bay, metal-framed, fabric-covered biplane with a side-by-side open cockpit and a cargo hold behind it. It first flew on 17 May 1928 with a 515 hp Bristol Jupiter IX and passed its tests at Martlesham Heath with better performance than predicted. Fitted with an Armstrong Siddeley Jaguar and extra fuel, a Vellore II carried a 5,000 lb load on an attempted flight from England to Australia in March 1929 and was wrecked after engine trouble near Cape Don. The Vellore III was a twin-engined development with two Jupiter engines, and a fourth aircraft was used until early 1935 to carry troops and stores. The last of the series, the Vellox, had a broader fuselage and was completed as an airliner, but was used by Imperial Airways as a freighter and mailplane and crashed at Croydon in August 1936, killing its four crew.