The Type 23 Badger was a new design using the Dragonfly engine, drawn up at the end of 1917 to meet a two-seat fighter-reconnaissance role and owing a good deal to the Bristol Scout F. It was a single-bay biplane with strongly staggered, unswept and unequal-span wings.

[1] During the design process, it became clear that the Dragonfly engine was proving unreliable and Bristol looked to a new nine-cylinder, 400 hp (300 kW) radial produced by Brazil Straker and known then as the Cosmos Jupiter as a possible alternative.

The Badger proved to have a lateral stability problem, an adverse yaw effect caused by aileron drag,[2] and because of this the third machine was not accepted by the Air Board.

Scaling from model to full size was a problem because the Reynolds numbers reached in the atmospheric pressure wind tunnels of the time were much lower than those encountered in full-size flight.

This first flew on 13 May 1919 and was Bristol's first civil registered aircraft,[4] initially as K110, then G-EABU, but was never able to provide the intended comparative data with tunnel models, crashing on 22 May.