She’s a big lumbering brute but, oh, how she flies!

Proponents of the Spitfire would no doubt take umbrage, but devotees of the bigger warbirds of the Second World War unabashedly call the Avro Lancaster the most beautiful aircraft ever built.

The crews who survived those long, cold and terrifying night missions over Germany—stragglers limping home, as they so often did, with their fuselages riddled by flak and 30mm cannon rounds, chunks of plane missing and wounded or dead aboard, hoping against hope they weren’t pursued—no doubt have a case.

Introduced in 1942, the “Lanc” was tough and tall—a beast with a long bomb bay ultimately capable of delivering the biggest payloads of the war: 4,000-pound (1,800 kilos), 8,000-pound (3,600 kg), and 12,000-pound (5,400 kg) blockbusters and, later, the 12,000-pound (5,400 kg) Tallboy and the 22,000-pound (10,000 kg) Grand Slam earthquake bombs.

Four of the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin engines took them to their targets and, by skill and good fortune, four—or fewer—brought them back.

By war’s end, Lancs had become one of the most heavily used night bombers of the Second World War, delivering 608,612 long tons (618,378,000 kg) of explosives over 156,000 sorties.

With Americans bombing by day, the air campaign proved brutal to both sides: More than half a million German citizens were killed by Allied bombs.

Of every 100 airmen who joined Britain’s Bomber Command, which included Canadians and other Empire airmen, 45 were killed, six were seriously wounded and eight became prisoners of war. Just 48 escaped unscathed.

According to the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alta., fewer than 25 of every 100 crews were expected to survive their first tour of 30 missions during the great offensives of 1943-’44. On a single night, the bombers took more losses than Fighter Command did during the entire Battle of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940.

By the time the war ended, 55,573 Bomber Command crewmen were dead, more than 10,000 of them Canadians.

But the legend of the Lancaster lived on. Only two still fly today, one of them in Canada.

It was May 19, 1942, and the BBC was recording its annual broadcast of nightingales singing in a 16th century English country garden in Surrey, south of London, when 197 bombers passed overheard en route to Mannheim, Germany—105 Wellingtons, 31 Stirlings, 29 Halifaxes, 15 Hampdens, 13 Lancasters and four Manchesters, their distant hum gradually becoming an ominous rumble behind the singing of the nightingale. Eleven of the aircraft did not return that night. The broadcast, which had been conducted in various forms each year for nearly two decades, was cancelled over operational security concerns.

Lancaster crew shoots down a Luftwaffe night fighter on final approach to their target in Berlin.