Aircraft

To read about all the hundreds of aircraft in the Biggles books is to take a grand tour through the story of aviation from the earliest years to the jet age. But it can also be a frustrating experience. W. E. Johns isn't always as precise as he could be. Sometimes he is vague about the aircraft type when he could be more specific. Sometimes he is specific when he doesn't have to be--why call a Vandal a Vickers when Vickers produced no such aircraft? Sometimes he uses a fictional aircraft when there is a real aircraft type which is perfectly suitable. At other times he uses a real aircraft which is plainly unsuitable or whose performance figures just cannot do what he says it does in the book.

The range of aircraft you are likely to encounter increases even more when you include the derivative works. For some reason, Johns was always reluctant to mention jets except may once in the case of the Hawker Hunter. Johns had apparently written to the editor of The Adventures of Biggles (comic) series and told him that "Biggles did not fly jets".^[1]

Derivative works by Vandersteen and Bergèse had no such qualms and you can see craft as modern as an F-104 or even a Space Shuttle.

Note that this category includes all aircraft which occur in the Biggles books, other books by W. E. Johns and even those mentioned in the derivative works based on the Biggles character. For more specific lists, see:

This category page remains work in progress. It expands as we create more aircraft articles.