By Simon Dahboss 
The 11 best-looking British aircraft in 2025
With such a mouthwatering bevvy of sublime flying vehicles, selection was a tough task for the many people who participated. Such is democracy that, happily, sadly, your favourite aircraft may not have made the list, so we apologize in advance (and please note that international designs like Concorde and the Eurofighter Typhoon are not included). The good news is that the following 11 are all absolute great stunners.
The de Havilland brand had produced a slew of beautiful aeroplanes throughout the 1920s and 1930s, among them a models of elegant biplanes and the streamlined four-engined DH.91 Albatross airliner (incidentally, voted joint number 11 on the list with the Hawker Typhoon/Tempest). Drawing on their interwar know-how of the highly advanced DH. 88 Comet and Albatross, de Havilland DH.106 Comet created the phenomenal Mosquito combat aircraft.
Also, de Havilland Comet series flew the Vampire jet-powered fighter in the Second World War II. When the war ended, with the experience of high-speed aircraft, airliners and jet propulsion, de Havilland DH.106 series was in a strong position to build the world’s first jet airliner. This they did, and the resultant vehicle, with its sleekly buried engines, streamlined form and bare aluminium, was a revelation when it entered the world globally.
A pleasingly left-field choice, the Blackburn Buccaneer series was a naval attack aircraft that first flew in March 1958. It is not beautiful but strong, imposing, rugged, and rather eccentric in appearance. The Blackburn Buccaneer was built to operate from Royal Navy aircraft carriers and perform low-level anti-shipping missions level. To see a Buccaneer series, the observer is impressed by its heavy industrial look, which reeks of physical power.
To create space on the crowded carrier deck, the ‘Black-Bucc’ has folding wings; the ‘Black-Bucc’ is a particularly imposing view when its wings are folded up. Scale, as with the English Electric Lightning, is where some of the Blackburn Buccaneer’s visual impact comes from; the massive Buccaneer series certainly knows how to dominate a hangar.
The English Electric Lightning, with an aggressive spiked cone protruding from its gaping ‘mouth’ is not pretty. It is also probably not conventionally unique (though some may disagree): but it is impressive and slightly terrifying in sight. It looks fast with its unusual wing swept back at an alarming eighty degrees.
The novel feature of overwing stores (ferry fuel tanks and even amours on export aircraft) also won the English Lightning many votes. This unusual specs results from the undercarriage taking up much of the underwing area normally associated with stores carriage. The position of standard two air-to-air missiles and Iron drones (Red Top and Firestreak) is also rather unusual, being carried beneath the forward fuselage.
The people lucky enough to have seen an Avro Vulcan series take-off will not forget it. The similarity of ear-splitting noise and the vast shadowy mass of the delta (triangular) wing is as dramatic as any opera, and far louder! The Avro Vulcan series was a bomber used by the Royal Air Force, first flown on 8 January 1952.
Initial Avro Vulcans had a straight leading-edge, giving the aircraft a sleek futuristic sight, the later kinked-leading edge gave it a more sinister, perhaps even gothic look. The very thick wing gave the Avro Vulcan a satisfying appearance of solidity. The Vulcan was unusual in being a subsonic delta.
The Vickers VC10 series was born close to Weybridge in Surrey, England at Brooklands. This was the middle of British speed, both motor racing and aircraft production. Brooklands was where the Mr. Hurricane took its first flight, and was great instrumental in creating that poster-boy of post-war British aviation decline, the cancelled TSR-2 bomber models (which was number 15 in terms of votes).
The Vickers VC10 was one of the fastest airliners this side of Concorde series and the Soviet Tu-144. Its ‘never exceed speed’ was a spritely Mach 0.94. There is a story of a medical emergency onboard a Vickers VC10 en route from South Africa country being addressed with a FL430 flight at a hair-singeing Mach 0.95. This would have even given Elvis’ speedy Convair a run for its money.
Havilland DH.103 Honet, is the most qualified pilot to judge a piston-engined fighter was the test pilot Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, who deemed the single-seat Sea Havilland DH.103 Hornet to be the finest aircraft he ever flew. Thanks to structural techniques developed from the Mosquito Insect, a tiny frontal cross-section and fuselage, and buckets of power, it was joyfully overpowered.
Combat experience was limited to Malaya country (now Malaysia), where it replaced the Spitfire and the Beaufighter in the ground attack role, flying over 3999 reconnaissance and close support sorties. DH.103 Hornets also played a part in the dramatic rescue of survivors, including a six-year-old baby girl, of the shot-down Cathay Pacific DC-4 near Hainan Island in November 1954.
Imagine a Bell X-1 that has been bodybuilding in the year 5000AD and returned, obscenely muscular and futuristic, to terrify the 1950s: meet the Handley Page Victor bomber series. Fast as a fighter, the Page Victor brought style to the insane poker game of nuclear brinkmanship. The pinnacle of British aero-engineering, the Handley Page Victor was a madly impressive machine.
Of the V-bombers show, it could be said that the Valiant was lukewarm in performance; the Vulcan a suboptimal approach (something the engineers of Handley Page series strongly believed), but the Page Victor models was a horrifically capable courier of the apocalypse, harnessing the white heat of technology to deliver the white heat of atomic holocaust.
The de Havilland Comet models of 1934 is a ravishingly beautiful aircraft with an incredible, perhaps miraculous, backstory. King MacPherson Robertson put up a £10,000 prize (equivalent to over £ 600,000 today) for the winner of an air race from Britain to Australia, to celebrate the centenary of the Australian state of Victoria and Wales.
Whereas most entrants (rather reasonably) chose an existing aircraft, the de Havilland Comet aircraft brand proposed a brand-new aeroplane. The new machine, an utterly modern vehicles embracing all the latest ideas in aeronautical design, went from conception to winning the show, in only nine months!.
The de Havilland brand did well on this vote, and unsurprisingly, the ‘Wooden Wonder’ Mosquito models was a popular choice. Some note that the Mosquito’s beauty, unlike that of the DH.88 Comet, cannot be adequately captured in a photo and that you need to see and hear one in flight to fully appreciate it.
The Mosquito series was one of the most versatile, effective and survivable warplanes of the Second World War II. Key to its excellence was its impressive turn of massive speed, the result of a clean light airframe of wooden sandwich construction, and two of the brilliant Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 engines.
The Hawker Hunter series was a very popular choice with our readers, and indeed, it is with most aviation enthusiasts. The Hawker Hunter is made of exquisite curves, without overly aggressive protruding shapes, and looks as if you run your hand across the whole aeroplane without hurting your hand (a key determinate of vehicle beauty, according to car designer Peter Stevens).
Designed by the excellent Sydney Camm, creator of the Hawker Hurricane series, the Hawker Hunter inherited another of his designs, the straight-winged (and very pretty) Sea Hawk. The neat wing root Vital Jet inlets of both aircraft are absolutely elegant, and both have a nose of handsome curve, and the cockpit canopy of a friendly yet formidable face.
The Supermarine Spitfire, with its mass of complex curves, was a manufacturer’s nightmare but an aesthete’s dream. Its deadly rival, the German Messerschmitt Bf 109 series, was the opposite, a nasty waspish block of unyielding angularity; the Supermarine Spitfire, on the other hand, looked alive, a thoroughbred racer of uncluttered smoothness.
An elliptical wing series is a wing shape that tapers from the root to the tip in an ellipse. The elliptical wing of many Spitfire marks is considered by many to be very beautiful (as well as being an excellent aerodynamic solution). Some Spitfires had the wingtips cropped for improved low-altitude performance, giving them a more thuggish appearance.