De Havilland Sea Vixen

DH.110 Sea Vixen
The last airworthy Sea Vixen at RNAS Yeovilton, 2014
General information
Type	Carrier-based fighter
National origin	United Kingdom
Manufacturer	de Havilland
Primary user	Royal Navy
Number built	151 (including two DH110 prototypes and one Sea Vixen prototype)
History
Introduction date	July 1959
First flight	26 September 1951[1]
Retired	1972

The de Havilland DH.110 Sea Vixen is a British twin-engine, twin boom-tailed, two-seat, carrier-based fleet air-defence fighter flown by the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The Sea Vixen was designed by the de Havilland Aircraft Company during the late 1940s at its Hatfield aircraft factory in Hertfordshire, developed from the company's earlier first generation jet fighters.^[a] It was later called the Hawker Siddeley Sea Vixen after de Havilland was absorbed by the Hawker Siddeley Corporation in 1960.

The Sea Vixen had the distinction of being the first British two-seat combat aircraft to achieve supersonic speed, albeit not in level flight. Operating from British aircraft carriers, it was used in combat over Tanganyika and over Yemen during the Aden Emergency. In 1972, the Sea Vixen was phased out in favour of the American-made McDonnell Douglas Phantom FG.1 interceptor. There have been no flying Sea Vixens since 2017.

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