Worst Weapon?

I wouldn't be surprised if a few Buffalo's broke up on landing. Especially carrier landings. It mentioned one plane that did it once and was cancelled but was that due to it being a bad plane or just out of it's time? Considering the competitoin it had at the time I don't think they made all that good a case for it being a bad plane. Indeed if we look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_FR_Fireball
one can see that it was definitly having teething problems. Now if we look at the proposed criteria for inclusion we find:

Clearly it meets criteria 1. Criteria 2 barely. And criteria 3 arguably not.
When one compares it's rather anemic armament (4 50.cals) to the then navy prefered 4 20 mm cannon and the the competing fighters of the day F6F, F4U, F7F, and F8F it simply looks like plane that was worth working the bugs out of. If you look at say the Me-262 would it show up any better or even as good? Especially if you restricted it to early developement?

 

If you can provide evidence, I'm all ears.

The Buffalo performed excellent service in the Finnish Air Force, so that has to be balanced against its failings with the USN.

 

Carrier landings are hard on planes. Most carrier planes of that period had a few bad landings. Then of course as we've stated several times the Buffalo's flown by the Finns were not at all the same plane as the late model ones in the USN.

 

IIRC the Finnish Buffs were closer to Brewsters' original design, and the USN ones were compromised by additional equipment specified by the Navy after the design was frozen.

So this is more an applications issue rather than something inherently wrong with the design.

Besides, lots of planes had versions that were unsuccessful e.g. early SB2C Helldivers, HP Halifaxes etc.

I don't think the Buffalo was particularly good, but it's not a slam-dunk bad aircraft either imo.

 

Actually we ALL are!