Preserved de Havilland Puss Moth aircraft G-AAZP flying at Old Warden Airfield in October 2014
The de Havilland Puss Moth is a British three-seater high-wing monoplane aeroplane designed and built by the de Havilland Aircraft Company between 1929 and 1933. It flew at a speed approaching 124 mph making it one of the highest-performance private aircraft of its era. The unnamed prototype which first flew in September 1929 was designed for the flourishing private flying movement in the United Kingdom. It was a streamlined all-wooden aircraft fitted with the new de Havilland Gipsy III inverted inline engine that gave unimpeded vision across the nose without the protruding cylinder heads of the earlier Gipsy II engine. After the prototype was tested, the aircraft was redesigned with a fabric-covered steel-tube fuselage and as such redesignated the Puss Moth. The first production aircraft flew in March 1930 and was promptly sent on a sales tour of Australia and New Zealand. Orders came quickly and in the three years of production ending in March 1933, 259 were manufactured in England. Most were used as private aircraft, though many also flew commercially with small air charter firms for passenger and mail carrying. During the early 1930s, were used for a number of record breaking flights. Most famous of the record breaking Puss Moths was Jim Mollison's G-ABXY, "The Heart's Content" which completed the first solo east-west Atlantic crossing in August 1932 from Portmarnock Strand near Dublin to New Brunswick, Canada and the first east-west crossing of the South Atlantic from Lympne Aerodrome to Natal, Brazil in February 1933. His wife Amy Johnson made record flights between England and Cape Town using G-ACAB, "Desert Cloud" in 1932. Melrose flew VH-UQO, named "My Hildegarde" in the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race. They finished overall seventh and second on handicap in a time of 10 days 16 hours.
Size: 4800px × 3840px
Location: Old Warden Airfield, Bedfordshire, UK
Photo credit: © Niall Ferguson / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: -abls, -abxy, aircraft, amy, australia, cloud, content, de, desert, , england, flying, havilland, heart, jim, johnson, macrobertson, mollison, moth, puss, race
