Worst warplane of WWII ?

And that, with all the additional armour & tropical equipment added on, the Buffaloes were bloomin' sluggish.

The versions flown by the Finns were actually far far lighter... and therefore had better performance.

 

For losses on Midway were mainly responisible wrong tactics, small number of availeble planes and totaly unexperianced crews. Midway based Wildcats were also shot out of the sky, but nobobdy is saying they were bad planes. It was simple the fact that small number of poorly trained pilots were pitted against the best Japanese naval fighters with best pilots in the world ( at the time) who also had numerical superiority.
Just take losses of TBF's ( 5 out of 6 were shot down last plane was heavely damaged) or TBD's ( who were buchered).
Decision to take Buffalo out off production was result of mismanagment of Brewster company CO's.

 

good thing you guys didnt put the pzl 11 on there because the pzl 11 was obsolete and it went up against me 109s they made the most of there planes and actually did good around 150 german planes shot down .but the polish did figure out that if you shot the me 109 in the engine it would start spraying oil everwhere and would catch on fire so that was disadvantage for the germans .Plus the pzl 11 was more manuverable than the me 109 (because of its bird like wings )

 

If you compare PZL-ajka with contemporary planes of the time (1939) one can see that it was not so outdated as it seems. For comparison:
Main Italian fighters of the time were still Fiat Cr-32's Chirri and Fiat Cr-42's,
Bulk of Soviet fighters consisted of Polikarpov I-15bis, I-153, and
British still ha large numbers of Gloster Gladiators in frontline service.

 

worst of all

forgive me if this has already been noted but the italians had one dog that went right from the factory to the front lines where it was used as a decoy or to scrapyards where it was junked. that'a right a brand new plane being used as a decoy becaure it was otherwise a total waste on time and material.

i had to go look it up just to be sure i go tthe right plane. it was the Breda Ba.88, a twin engined attack/ bomber/ recon aircraft. first flown 1936, in action june 1940, being junked by nov 1940 as useless. in 1943 an updated type was tried out as a dive bomber. it also failed badly. a max combat life of 6 mo. before being withdrawn and junked is about the worse case i've ever heard of.

 

Yep, Ricky mentioned it on the second page, but I agree entirely, at least the Rocs at Southampton were manned and powered to provide static AA!

 

Re: worst of all

Can only be the Breda 88 Lince!
Very good looking aircraft but......that is about the only good thing i can tell about it

 

Well, my pick is still the Heinkel 177. Of course, the Douglas TBD Devastator comes in a close second.

 

At least when the He177 worked it was a useful aircraft, the same cannot be said for the Ba88, the Blackburn Roc or the Botha.

The Devastator similarly cannot really be considered a bad plane it was arguably obsolescent but it was bad tactics/misfortune at Midway that got the TBDs slaughtered.

If the Devastator had been replaced with any other aircraft at Midway the results would almost certainly have been the same, and it is worth stating that in the previous carrier engagements not a single Devastator was lost in combat.

To be considered truely one of the worst planes, I think the offenders should either be more dangerous to their crews than to the enemy or to be an aircraft that's only useful role did not involve flying (i.e. Runway Decoy for the Ba88, Instructional Airframe for the Botha).

 

Back to the Zubr again, which liked to fall apart in the sky (if it ever got up there).

 

Zubr - so ugly it deserves to be shot up



HE 177 - another butt ugly plane



FNG

 

It is hard to come up with a better contender than the Zubr.

I can't help wondering why every "Worst Plane" thread I've read almost always includes the He177 in the opening posts but the Manchester very rarely gets a mention.

 

yeah everybody rapes the german misdevelopments but there were also many allied crap that has fallen under the carpet
as simor said the manchester for example

 

The AVRO Manchester looks like a wellington which I thought was a competant plane. Whats the difference?



FNG

 

Are you sure you don't mean it looks like a Lancaster?

The problem the Manchester had was the reliability of the engines, or lack of. The Vultures were I believe basically paired Peregrines (The engine that powered the Whirlwind), and suffered from the latter's poor reliability compounded by being doubled up.

I mentioned the Manchester in particular because in many ways it seems to mirror the failure of the He177. Paired engines, unreliability, solution eventually came in the form of a four engine powerplant (a 4 Merlin engine Manchester became the Lancaster).

 

The Zubr looks like a Whitley with a bad skin condition...

 

And had the Germans followed suit with the He 177, they might also have had a winner on their hands. But they never did, as the old dogma of "all bombers must dive" came back to haunt them.

 

I'm not so sure, I don't believe a strategic bomber would have actually helped Germany. In fact I think there's a very good chance that diverting effort to mass-produce strategic bombers would have done the German war effort more harm than good.

But cerainly the 4 prop arrangement that eventually powered the He274 was a far better arrangement and led to an altogether much more satisfactory aircraft. If they'd gone for that earlier on the He177 might not have been remembered as such a turkey.

 

i think its hard to say what was worsest airplane of ww2
take the b-17 befor the 8th af recived it and other usaaf units
the us gave the b-17 to the brits they used it once against norway and then they were so disapointed by the b-17 that they immidiatly put em out of service and gave the laST MODELS TO THE Coastal command
but if you ask the americans for them the b-17 was great
same with the p-51 and p-47 they were also gave to the brits but they were also not so happy with em

 

Well, the B17 the RAF recieved was a very different plane from the ones that equipped the 8th AAF. The RAF initially recieved the B17C/D, which had a defensive armament about comparable with the He111! Yes, they weren't overly impressed but it was partly the reports of the RAF's experiences that Boeing were able to improve the design and come up with the B17E, then the almost identicle F.

Similarly the Mustang MkI was a very different aircraft from the P-51D and K that fulfilled the majority of the production runs. Different armament, different engine, completely different performance, especially at altitude. Again, the RAF at Farnborough took a Mustang MkI, put a Merlin in it and the successfull P-51B and C was basically born.

As for the P-47, well there it wasn't so much the British disliked it from what I understand, there just wasn't much of a need for it. We already had perfectly capable shorter ranged fighters, why did we need yet another airframe and engine to learn how to look after?

As for the worst, well some do stand head and shoulders above the rest. The Ba88 Lince for example, most went straight from the factory to be used as decoys on airfields. Seriously, here you have a multi-role fighter whose career highlight was being put out in the open on an airfield in the hope that bombs and strafers would blow them up instead of anything usefull! Compare that to the Mustang MkI and Fortress MkI, the RAF had a pretty good time with those!