Plenty of authors have expounded their own views of what were the best fighters of World War II. Fast, technologically advanced airplanes like the P-51 Mustang or the P-38 Lightning are almost certain to make such lists. Others might cite Germany’s revolutionary Me-262 jet fighter, or Britain’s Supermarine Spitfire.
Not so many have tried compiling a list of the worst fighters from the conflict, even though there are plenty of airplanes that could be nominated, from many different countries. While it may be true that no one sets out to design a bad airplane, factors outside a designer’s control can lead to unsatisfactory results. Some of these airplanes were already obsolescent before they rolled off the production line. Others suffered from the use of substandard materials in their construction. Still others were acts of desperation. And there can always be unknown factors no designer could have predicted that can derail a design that looks great on paper.
Here, then, is a modest proposal for such a list, the sort on which nobody ever wants to be included.
Brewster F2A Buffalo
Produced by a company owned by an aviation consultant to the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, this underperforming carrier-based fighter earned a disastrous reputation with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marines and the Royal, Royal Australian and Royal Netherlands East Indies Air Forces. Only the Finns proved a spectacular exception with the B-239 export version, although that success has been attributed more to the quality of their training and doctrine—as well as the relative incompetence of their Soviet adversaries—than to the Buffalo’s merits.
Brewster Aeronautical’s management insisted that they were the victims of sabotage, but perhaps the problem was simply their own poor production methods. The factory was a multi-story building in an urban area of Queens, New York, a venue hardly conducive to the production of aircraft. Components fabricated on several different floors
