The 10 worst British military aircraft

If you want something done slowly, expensively and possibly very well, you go to the British.

While Britain created the immortal Spitfire, Lancaster and Mosquito it also created a wealth of sometimes dangerous, disgraceful and diabolical designs. These are just ten plucked from a shortlist of thirty.  In defining ‘worst’- we’ve looked for one, or a combination, of the following: design flaws, conceptual mistakes, being extremely dangerous, being unpleasant to fly, or obsolete at the point of service entry (and the type must have entered service). 

10: Blackburn Beverley

A mere year separates the service entry of the Beverley (1955) and America’s Lockheed C-130 Hercules (1956), yet sixty years later one of these is still the best tactical transport – serving with many air forces around the world - and the other only exists in the form of a single lonely museum piece standing in the cold in a village near Hull in England. There’s a reason for this.

The Beverley had four Bristol Centaurus engines capable of generating a total of 11,400 horsepower pulling a fully loaded Beverley weighing 135,000 lb (61,235kg); the C-130A had a maximum weight of 124,200 lb (56,336kg) and had 15,000 of turboprop horsepower to move it. The Centaurus also powered the abysmal Firebrand, hopeless Buckingham and the technically brilliant (but conceptually wrong-headed) Brabazon, and, for the sake of fairness, the brilliant Sea Fury.

Of note, the Beverley was fitted with perhaps the most dangerous toilet in aviation. This was fitted in the rear of the aircraft next to the paratroop hatch. One unlucky serviceman fell twenty feet when exiting the toilet, falling through the then open paratroop hatch on the tailboom floor.

Lockheed threw vast resources at getting the Hercules right (so much so that senior Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson thought the project would sink the whole company), whereas Blackburn used warmed-up World War II technology and a dawdling development time to produce an aircraft that was at best an over-specialised oddity.  

9: Supermarine Scimitar

Take an aircraft so dangerous that is statistically more likely than not to crash over a twelve-year period and arm it with a nuclear bomb. Prior to this, ensure one example crashes and kills its first Commanding Officer, in front of the press.

There you have the Scimitar. Extremely maintenance heavy, an inferior fighter to the De Havilland Sea Vixen and a worse bomber than the Blackburn Buccaneer; the Scimitar was certainly not Joe Smith’s finest moment – that had been his stellar work on the rather more famous Spitfire. 

The Supermarine Scimitar was the last Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm aircraft designed with an obsolete requirement to be able to make an unaccelerated carrier take-off, and as a result had to have a thicker and larger wing than would otherwise be required.

Only once did a Scimitar ever such make an unassisted take-off, with a very light fuel load and no stores, and then just to prove that it could be done. But yet the Scimitar was cursed to spend its entire life carrying this heavy overly thick wing. 

8: Panavia Tornado F2

The Tornado interceptor was a British development of an international aircraft. In the 1970s, the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) pushed heavily for an interceptor variant of the Tornado (a ground-attack aircraft). BAC promised a low-cost, low-risk, high-performance fighter interceptor, this was not to be the reality.

Essentially, they took a heavy airframe optimised for low-level flight, with engines also optimised for low-level flight and a radar optimised for attacking ground targets from low-level flight, and attempted to turn it into an interceptor intended to attack bombers at medium and high altitudes. 

To add to the fun, it was decided to develop an extremely ambitious new radar, despite Britain not having created an advanced fighter radar since the Lightning’s AI.23 in the 1950s. Despite its ‘F for Fighter’ designation, and the euphemistic ‘interim’ description, the F2 ended up without a functioning radar, as the new sensor suffered terrible teething problems.

Issues with the aircraft’s centre of gravity, caused by the absent radar, were solved with a chunk of concrete ballast satirically dubbed the ‘Blue Circle radar’ after a cement brand. Despite the Tornado’s terrible high-altitude performance and poor agility, huge amounts of money and time led to the F3, which eventually matured into a capable weapon system. 

7: Gloster Javelin

It takes a special kind of genius to make an aircraft with one of the highest thrust-to-weight ratios of its generation incapable of flying faster than the speed of sound, but that’s what Gloster did; it even had a triangular ‘delta’ wing the shape of choice for supersonic flight.

The Javelin fighter entered service in 1956, the same year as the dreadful Convair F-102, but even the disappointing American fighter would have smashed the Javelin in a drag race. Bizarrely, the use of afterburner - the combustion of fuel in the exhaust of the engine for additional thrust - below 12,000 feet (3657 m) actually slowed the aircraft down; it visibly burned fuel but reduced the core thrust; the engine core was competing with the afterburner for the fuel-flow available.

Add to this lamentable low-level turn-rates, nightmarishly bad access to internal parts for maintenance crews and frequent post-start fires and you have a turkey on your hands. After a mere twelve years in service, the RAF dropped it. Unsurprisingly, no export orders were received for the ‘Tripe Triangle’.

We spoke to former Javelin pilot Peter Day, who noted that the aircraft was an excellent drinks cooler: ‘A complete box of Tiger beer would fit into each gun magazine and be perfectly cooled after flight.’

6: Blackburn Firebrand

The story of the Firebrand torpedo fighter is a rotten one. The specification for the type was issued in 1939, but it wasn’t until the closing weeks of the Second World War that it began to enter service. Despite a luxuriously long development, it was an utter pig in the air, with stability issues in all axes and a tendency to lethal stalls.

There was a litany of restrictions to try to reduce the risks, including the banning of external tanks, but it still remained ineffective and dangerous to fly. Worse still, instead of trying to rectify the problems, the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) started a witch-hunt of those pilots who dared to speak the truth about the abysmal machine. 

5: De Havilland DH.110 Sea Vixen

The Royal Navy’s Sea Vixen fighters were death traps, frankly. A total of 145 Sea Vixens were built, of these 38% were lost over the type’s twelve-year operational life. More than half of the incidents were fatal. The Sea Vixen entered service in 1959 (despite a first flight eight years earlier), two years later than the US Navy’s Vought F-8 Crusader.

The F-8 was more than twice as fast as the Sea Vixen, despite having 3,000Ibs less thrust. The development of the Sea Vixen had been glacial. The specification was issued in 1947, initially for an aircraft to serve both the FAA and the RAF. The DH.110 prototype first flew in 1951, and one crashed at the Farnborough the following year. 

This slowed down the project, which was then put on hold as the company and the Royal Navy focused on the alternative DH.116 ‘Super Venom’. Once the project became prioritised again, it was substantially redesigned to make it fully useful for naval use.

Then when the Royal Navy gave a firm commitment, it requested a radar with a bigger scanner and several other time-consuming modifications. All of which meant it arrived way too late. Its peer, the US F-8 remained in frontline service until 2000, its other contemporary, the F-4, remains in service today; the Sea Vixen retired in 1972. 51 Royal Navy aircrew were killed flying the Sea Vixen.

4: Blackburn Roc

The Blackburn Roc was a fairly innocuous flying machine. However, as an example of the wrong concept applied to the wrong airframe to produce a useless combat aircraft, it is hard to beat. ‘Turret fighters’ had their gun armament mounted in a heavy steerable turret, an arrangement that was popular in Britain just before the war.

Though useful for defensive means on a bomber, a fighter is dependent on the speed and agilty, qualities massively hampered by the weight and drag of a turret and its attendant gunner. The turret fighter concept was most memorably realised in the Boulton Paul Defiant, an extremely well designed machine, considering its type.

The Blackburn Roc, by contrast, was lumbered with a massively over-engineered airframe (a legacy of being derived from a dive-bomber, the Blackburn Skua), had a less powerful engine and was over 100 mph (161km/h) slower than the Boulton Paul Defiant.

How an aircraft that could not attain 200 mph (322 km/h) was expected to survive, let alone fight, in 1940 is one of the enduring mysteries of the early war period. It’s also a wonder that its only confirmed kill was a German Junkers Ju 88, one of the world’s fastest bombers.

3: Saunders-Roe A.36 Lerwick

Despite possessing a decidedly cuddly design the Saunders-Roe A.36 Lerwick was a killer, difficult to handle in the air or on the water and a miserable combat aircraft. Recommended to be scrapped in 1939, the Lerwicks were pressed into service due to the lack of any alternative and of 21 built, 11 were lost, 10 in accidents and one simply vanished without trace.

Its main problems were the old chestnuts of lack of power coupled with an inexplicable lack of stability. The Lerwick could not be flown hands-off, a serious flaw for a long-range patrol aircraft nor could it maintain height on one engine. It was prone to snaking on landing and take off, and possessed a vicious stall. 

Added to these structural concerns, including the terrifying fact that the floats regularly broke off, and a woefully unreliable hydraulic system and it is amazing that the diminishing number of Lerwicks managed to remain in use until the end of 1942.

During its squadron service, from June 1939 to November 1942, thirty airmen and one civilian technician lost their lives in Lerwick accidents in return for 2,000 lb (907 kg) of bombs dropped on one submarine with no measurable result. The obscure story of the dreadful Lerwick demonstrates how hard-won the successes were that were yet to come.

2: Blackburn Botha

Another terrible Blackburn design, the Botha was damned from a chronic lack of power. Its poor performance meant it was never to enter service in its primary role as a torpedo bomber. Had that been all it would have been nothing worse than an obscure mediocrity.

But Blackburn had made it extremely difficult to actually see out of the aircraft except dead ahead, and impossible to see out to the side or rear due to the engine placement. This poor view out was an appalling flaw for an aircraft now intended for reconnaissance and the Botha was supplanted by the Avro Anson, which it had been supposed to replace. 

Despite only entering service in 1939, and despite the war effort requiring every decent or even semi-decent, warplane available, it was sensibly withdrawn from frontline service in 1941. It was passed to both training units and the target tug role (pulling a banner for other better aircraft to practice their gunnery skills upon).

The Botha’s vicious handling traits, including poor lateral stability and deadly one-engine-out handling characteristics conspired with its underpowered nature to produce a large number of accidents. In 1943, the type was declared obsolete, yet somehow it soldiered on until 1944. A slightly terrifying total of 580 were built. 

1: Blackburn TB (Twin Blackburn)

The TB was a bad aircraft that couldn’t perform the one task it was designed for and thus set a precedent for many Blackburns to come. The Twin Blackburn nevertheless saw service for a year or so before it was finally put out of its misery and all nine examples were scrapped.

Intended to destroy Zeppelin airships, the floatplane TB was supposed to climb above Zeppelin height and drop explosive Ranken darts onto them. Unfortunately, the poor, underpowered Twin Blackburn was unable to drag itself to airship-operating altitude, even after its deadly cargo of explosive darts had been cut by two thirds.