The Vickers Armstrong Wellington
The Mighty Wimpy
Here lies the wreck of an excellent example of a Vickers Wellington bomber.
The Vickers Wellington was a twin-engine,
medium bomber designed in the mid-1930s at Brooklands in Surrey by R.K.Pierson.
Popularly known as the "Wimpey", it was widely used in the first two years of
World War II before being replaced as a bomber by much larger four-engine
designs like th Avro Lancaster.
The Wellington used a unique geodetic construction designed by the famous Barnes
Wallis for airships and used to to build the Vickers Wellesley bomber. The
fuselage was built up from a number of steel channel-beams that were formed into
a large network. This gave the plane remendous strength because any one of
the stringers could support some of the weight from even the opposite side of
the plane. Blowing out one side's beams would still leave the plane as a
whole intact. Wellingtons with huge holes cut out of them continued to
return home when other planes would not have survived. As you can see the
wreck of this "Wimpey" is very intact but the skin has deteriorated almost
completely to expose the geodetic construction.