Airspeed AS.5 Courier

The Airspeed Courier was a British six-seater single-engined light aircraft that saw some use as airliner. The prototype was designed by Hessell Tiltman (co-founder of Airspeed Limited) and was built in 1932 by Airspeed at York for an attempt by Sir Alan Cobham to perform a non-stop flight to India using airborne refuelling. Airspeed changed their headquarters from York to Portsmouth before the first prototype, registered as G-ABXN flew for the first time on 10th April 1933. It was a low-wing cabin monoplane made entirely out of wood, with the novel feature, for the time, of a retractable undercarriage.
It was powered by a single Armstrong Siddeley Lynx engine, which delivered 240 hp of power. The prototype suffered two minor accidents, in April and June 1933 at Portsmouth and RAF Martlesham Heath respectively. The aircraft was soon repaired in both occasions.
After a year perfecting airborne refuelling, Sir Alan Cobham took off from Portsmouth in the Prototype, in order to reach India on 24th September 1934. His aircraft was refuelled by a Handley-Page W.10, but he had to perform a forced landing at Malta due to a broken throttle.
Fifteen Couriers were manufactured during 1933 and 1934 with many of them being used for air-racing, with one of them finishing in the sixth place at the MacRobertson Air Race to Australia in 1934. They were also used as light airliners and air taxis.
The British engineer Nevil Shute wrote in his book Slide Rule: Autobiography of an engineer that six Couriers came back to Airspeed when their operating company suspended operations but shortly after that the Spanish Civil War broke out and the machines all sold immediately to various intermediaries for better than the original prices, and all went by devious routes to Spain. He had got a reputation as unscrupulous for resisting auditors' attempt to write their value down on the books.
In 1936 a gun-running organization called Union Founders' Trust, bought five Couriers with the intention of selling them to the Spanish Republican Government. However, the protest of the non-intervention lobby in England stopped the delivery. Two republican sympathisers on the Airspeed staff tried to steal the G-ACVE, but one of them, Arthur Gargett, died when the machine crashed after taking off at Portsmouth on 20th August 1936 while the other, Joseph Smith, was sentenced to four months in prison.
Thank to their advanced aerodynamical features, two Couriers were used as research machines, one by the Royal Aircraft Establishment and other one by D. Napier & Son Ltd., which used it to develop the Napier Rapier engine. When the World War II broke out, most of them were impressed into the Royal Air Force, who used them for communications purposes. Only one Courier survived the war and was used for joyriding at Southend-on-Sea, Essex, before being scrapped in December 1947.

Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspeed_Courier
2. http://bioold.science.ku.dk/drnash/model/spain/didnt.html