Worst aircraft ever?

Murdo · November 17, 2009

The much maligned Blackburn did produce the Buccaneer...

Lovely plane, apparently superb at what it was designed for... and a few other things too.

Edited November 17, 2009 by Murdo

pigsty · November 18, 2009

I agree with you there. However, a missile armament, even the primitive and unreliable 1950's era missiled would be a big advantage when shooting down bombers.

The most effective anti-bomber armament of the 1950s was actually rockets - either fire two hundred of them at a load of bombers, or fire just one but give it a nuclear warhead. The original AIM-9 was all but useless (that was why the USAF waited before adopting it) and the early AIM-4 was marginal. This means, despite all its faults, the F-89 was actually a pretty good aircraft. Go figure, eh.

qn30jEkPz7 · May 29, 2018

On 10/11/2009 at 20:10, Ouroboros said:

Slow day at work,

My vote for The Christmas Bullet aka Cantilever Aero Bullet.

No wonder both prototypes crashed during their first flights.

Just dug this thread up after this article https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-christmas-bullet-was-the-worst-plane-ever-made-1825187889 inspired a search to see if anyone had modelled it.

Silenoz · May 29, 2018

No Ki-115? Solely made for kamikaze, but it only worked if one could stay airborne long enough...

stevehnz · May 29, 2018

7 hours ago, LostCosmonauts said:

Just dug this thread up after this article https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-christmas-bullet-was-the-worst-plane-ever-made-1825187889 inspired a search to see if anyone had modelled it.

He really was a piece of work was Dr Christmas.

Steve.

qn30jEkPz7 · May 29, 2018

@stevehnz

Dr Christmas: 0/10 for knowing what he was doing, 0/10 Ethics, 10/10 Sheer brass neck, 10/10 Salesmanship. It’s frankly a miracle he didn’t go into politics

stevehnz · May 29, 2018

21 minutes ago, LostCosmonauts said:

It’s frankly a miracle he didn’t go into politics

Prison was what I had in mind as being his natural reward, a good example of how gullible some people can be.

Steve.

mike romeo · June 2, 2018

Tarrant Tabor?

Max Headroom · June 2, 2018

Any Gee Bee racer?

Trevor

Hook · June 3, 2018

How about the Fairey Albacore?

Surely, being retired before the Swordfish it was designed to replace must count for something.

Cheers,

Andre

snapper_city · June 3, 2018

Has the Me210 been mentioned yet?

Max Headroom · June 3, 2018

Or the Lockheed XFV-12?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_XFV-12

Trevor

Silenoz · June 4, 2018

or the XF-85 Goblin...

Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies · June 4, 2018

Interesting thread, but like most criticisms as such, it is performed with the benefit of much hindsight and much of what has been written over the years about bad aircraft was written by people who peak at delivering newspapers rather than delivering new weapons systems.

Through the late 1800s, all of the worlds' significant navies started to recognise that guns could be bigger and ships could be clad in iron. The guns became huge and the iron cladding extremely thick, but due to a couple of examples of opportunistic ramming which holed ships below the waterline and sank them, it was perceived that with the invention of steam engines the old sailing ship tactics were down the plug hole and that ramming would be the new technique of choice. This was because there were no real experiences of fighting with steam ships and absolutely everyone was guessing and theorising what a battle might look like, and by extension, what tactics to employ and thus what weaponry and armour a warship ought to have.

In 1903 the first aeroplane flew. Early in the first world war someone figured out that you might be able to use them in the military.

The pace of technological development not only of aerodynamics but propulsion, weapons, avionics etc made the period between the wars and during 1950s and early 1960s in particular pure guesswork as to what would be useful. By the time a concept had been fully designed and built (a process that most people frankly are entirely unqualified to even visualise, never mind comment on) the world had moved off in a different direction leaving many experimental concepts at an evolutionary dead end.

It is the easiest thing in the world to criticise with hindsight. There is a particular piece in Sun Tzu's The Art of War which is seldom quoted. I can but paraphrase at the moment but essentially he said that "Just because you can see the sun in the sky doesn't mean you have great vision". What he was articulating was that the one who gains the advantage in war foresees the future before everyone else can too. Most of these apparently bad aircraft could have been fairly successful had the future the designers or whomever wrote the specification foreseen have come to fruition, but they didn't. Some futures were of course more likely than others, but again that's hindsight for many and logic at the time for very few. Coming back to naval ramming tactics, it was understood by a very small number of professionals excluding the Admiralty at large that ramming was virtually impossible when the target ship was under way and under control. However, the vast majority of people are exceptionally bad at rational thought and put far too much stock in their instincts, which in the modern world are usually wrong. Thus, often poor specifications are written. Later, people choose to fool themselves that they would have foreseen things logically, and thus whoever wrote the specification must have been stupid. In reality, most would get it wrong.

If it takes 10-15 years to develop a new generation of combat aircraft after the F-35 and you are to start on it now, what threat is it designed to combat? What will the world look like in 15-20 years' time? Who will the enemy be and how will they prefer to fight you? What sort of aircraft will be most useful and versatile in whatever future that is?

Graham Boak · June 4, 2018

I believe that managing to get into the air at all, even if only once, disqualifies any aircraft from the title of worst ever.

dalea · June 4, 2018

Exactly, that's why my money is ion the Bonney Gull. The Wright brothers had already proved that copying the birds was a literal dead end.

Graham Boak · June 4, 2018

On 11/17/2009 at 11:44 PM, Murdo said:

The much maligned Blackburn did produce the Buccaneer...

Lovely plane, apparently superb at what it was designed for... and a few other things too.

The Buccaneer was so good because it was designed by ex-Handley Page designers after their work was done on the Victor. I was told that at Page's so it must be true.

It did need re-engining, but you can't blame the airframe on the engine's shortcomings. The whole Gyron/Gyron Junior story is a bit depressing. The Bucc could also have done with a better radar than that pimple on the front. The test machines with Tornado radar looked much better, if you didn't look too closely at the join. But that was a lot later...

Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies · June 4, 2018

I have a Buccaneer radome in my garage. I wonder if its owner will ever come to collect it, or whether I now own a Buccaneer radome. 😂

junglierating · June 4, 2018

Look you are all wrong its clearly the Merlin Mk3/3a even the junior service couldn't wait to 'mag to grid' it😂

Giorgio N · June 5, 2018

20 hours ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

Interesting thread, but like most criticisms as such, it is performed with the benefit of much hindsight and much of what has been written over the years about bad aircraft was written by people who peak at delivering newspapers rather than delivering new weapons systems.

Through the late 1800s, all of the worlds' significant navies started to recognise that guns could be bigger and ships could be clad in iron. The guns became huge and the iron cladding extremely thick, but due to a couple of examples of opportunistic ramming which holed ships below the waterline and sank them, it was perceived that with the invention of steam engines the old sailing ship tactics were down the plug hole and that ramming would be the new technique of choice. This was because there were no real experiences of fighting with steam ships and absolutely everyone was guessing and theorising what a battle might look like, and by extension, what tactics to employ and thus what weaponry and armour a warship ought to have.

In 1903 the first aeroplane flew. Early in the first world war someone figured out that you might be able to use them in the military.

The pace of technological development not only of aerodynamics but propulsion, weapons, avionics etc made the period between the wars and during 1950s and early 1960s in particular pure guesswork as to what would be useful. By the time a concept had been fully designed and built (a process that most people frankly are entirely unqualified to even visualise, never mind comment on) the world had moved off in a different direction leaving many experimental concepts at an evolutionary dead end.

It is the easiest thing in the world to criticise with hindsight. There is a particular piece in Sun Tzu's The Art of War which is seldom quoted. I can but paraphrase at the moment but essentially he said that "Just because you can see the sun in the sky doesn't mean you have great vision". What he was articulating was that the one who gains the advantage in war foresees the future before everyone else can too. Most of these apparently bad aircraft could have been fairly successful had the future the designers or whomever wrote the specification foreseen have come to fruition, but they didn't. Some futures were of course more likely than others, but again that's hindsight for many and logic at the time for very few. Coming back to naval ramming tactics, it was understood by a very small number of professionals excluding the Admiralty at large that ramming was virtually impossible when the target ship was under way and under control. However, the vast majority of people are exceptionally bad at rational thought and put far too much stock in their instincts, which in the modern world are usually wrong. Thus, often poor specifications are written. Later, people choose to fool themselves that they would have foreseen things logically, and thus whoever wrote the specification must have been stupid. In reality, most would get it wrong.

If it takes 10-15 years to develop a new generation of combat aircraft after the F-35 and you are to start on it now, what threat is it designed to combat? What will the world look like in 15-20 years' time? Who will the enemy be and how will they prefer to fight you? What sort of aircraft will be most useful and versatile in whatever future that is?

All very good points, that I agree with for the most part. In particular I often mention that whenever we judge an aircraft, especially a military aircraft, we should keep well in mind the specifications that led to the aircraft. We often forget that sometimes the aircraft may have been a very good answer to a certain set of requests but the requests were not based on a correct understanding of the evolution of air warfare (or of the market for commercial aircrafts).

For your same reasons I wouldn't consider early aircrafts as in those days there was very little knowledge of aerodynamics and really many early aircrafts were wild attempts at getting something in the air.

The same is in a sense true as you said of the interwar years, and in part in the late '40s/early '50s.However I would disagree on extending this period to the early '60s as by then (and actually even earlier) it was pretty clear, at least to most, which lines of development were useful and which were not. Something that could be said of other eras as well and here's where some candidates for the "worst" title are often found...

There have been times when certain ideas started becoming accepted, and yet not all designers or customers were ready to abandon previous ideas yet. Other designers were on the other hand interested in following these novel ideas but were constrained by one or more issue. An example of this state of things can be seen in the evolution of fighter aircrafts in the late '30s, when it started becoming clear that the advent of retractable landing gear and robust cantilever monoplane construction led to the development of fighters with higher and higher performance. In Italy for example this development was not seen too positively by several in the Air Force, particularly among fighter pilots and there were many who believed it would have been a short lived fashion. Of course not everyone was stuck in the past and the Air Force started developing modern monoplane fighters. The results however were not great because of a few constraints: the lack of good powerful engines for a starter, something that was only sorted with the arrival of licence built German models. But also the use by local companies of relatively antiquated construction techniques, that meant heavier airframes compared to what others were doing. Now we may not include types like the Mc.200 or the G.50 in a list of worst aircrafts, but they weren't that good either...

A similar situation in my view affected the British industry in the '50s, when for various reasons the local companies lagged behind the US and the USSR. Of course some good types were also designed, but several arrived on the scene somewhat late, with limited success.

Last but not least, a very interesting point is this:

20 hours ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

If it takes 10-15 years to develop a new generation of combat aircraft after the F-35 and you are to start on it now, what threat is it designed to combat? What will the world look like in 15-20 years' time? Who will the enemy be and how will they prefer to fight you? What sort of aircraft will be most useful and versatile in whatever future that is?

It sounds a difficult question but there are answers to this. And the first answer is that if you want to win you don't let the enemy choose the way they prefer to fight you but you impose your way of fighting to the enemy. This is what the US have been doing for a while, they have exploited superior technology and a very thorough analytic approach to be the first on the scene with whatever new feature can change the outcome of air battles. That in the last 50 years all other countries have done little more than responding to what the US have introduced is a sign that this approach works.

With all the above said, I believe that it is still possible to find aircrafts that have been really bad, if not maybe the worst. Aircrafts that failed not because the specifications were wrong, not because they followed operational or design concepts that were later found flawed but simply because whoever designed and built them made a damn both of whatever they were supposed to do.

One prime candidate is IMHO the Breda Ba.88, an aircraft so bad that after only a few missions the whole fleet was relegated to a very demeaning role: being spread around airfields as decoys !

Sure the Ba.8 suffered from the chronic lack of powerful enough engines that afflicted many Italian aircrafts, but Breda designers designed an aircraft so overweight that not even finding a decent engine would have sorted the problem. All attempts at curing the weight issues were carried out with very little imagination and probably also with very little interest and they brought to nothing. In the end the ground attack role that this aircraft was designed to fulfill ended on the shoulders of modified CR.42 biplanes, wityh much better results. As the Ba.88 was in the view of many (myself included) an attractive aircraft, the history of this type shows that the old adage saying that "if an aircraft looks good then will fly well" is not really a true rule in aerospace engineering...

Edited June 5, 2018 by Giorgio N

stevehnz · June 5, 2018

On 6/3/2018 at 8:43 PM, Hook said:

How about the Fairey Albacore?

Surely, being retired before the Swordfish it was designed to replace must count for something.

Cheers,

Andre

I'm not sure this is quite fair to the Albacore. Although it wasn't good enough to oust the Swordfish, which in it's own way was outstanding at what it did, the Albacore wasn't an especially bad plane & was competent enough but just not outstanding enough, especially with the coming availability of Barracudas & especially Grumman TBMs to the Fleet Air Arm. IMHO of course.