‘Only a twenty foot margin for error’ That sounds fun, where do I sign up?

Considering they invented the aircraft carrier, Britain’s Royal Navy has really pulled out the stops ever since to field as many aircraft as possible that were too slow, too dangerous, too late, too expensive or sometimes all four. Not content with producing their own obsolescent deathtraps, the Senior Service also took on cast-offs from the RAF and bought in the occasional American dud to swell the numbers of inadequate aircraft crowding the decks of their too-small carriers. Narrowing down this underwhelming armada to a flotilla of merely ten was a daunting and difficult task. We hope you will agree that this was a valuable endeavour and time well spent.

10. Parnall Peto

The Peto performs its famed Polaris impression

The Peto was, in its way, an excellent little aircraft but it was the realisation of a terrible idea if not a terrible flying machine. Tragically, a single airframe (of two built) directly resulted in the deaths of 60 Royal Navy personnel, possibly the worst loss versus production ratio of any military aircraft. The Peto was designed for a seemingly ridiculous purpose: to serve as a scout aircraft for a submarine, in this case, the Royal Navy’s largest, the M-class. The concept was also toyed with by the French, German, US and Japanese navies but only Japan pursued it with any seriousness or success. A diminutive machine for obvious reasons, the Peto had folding wings and was housed in a watertight hangar immediately ahead of the conning tower. The crew of the M2 were zealous in their attempts to launch the aircraft in the shortest possible time after surfacing. Probably a little too zealous as it turns out, witnesses on a passing ship, unaware that anything was amiss, saw M2 briefly surface, then submerge forever. When the wreck was discovered, the hangar doors were found to be open: in their haste to launch the Peto, the doors had been opened too early and the hangar flooded, dragging the M2, the Peto and sixty sailors to the bottom.

Flying the Phantom, British-style here

9. Curtiss Seamew

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Most of the best aircraft operated by the Royal Navy during the second world war were of American origin and types such as the Wildcat, Corsair and Avenger dominated FAA flight decks for most of the conflict. There were, however exceptions to this rule and chief amongst them was the appalling Curtiss Seamew. 250 were allocated for British use but only 100 were delivered before the Royal Navy refused to take any more and sensibly demanded Vought Kingfishers instead. It’s not entirely surprising that the USN had tried to offload as many Seamews as possible onto their allies; the Seamew didn’t even win the competition that selected it for service. A rival design by Vought was judged superior but Vought were busy with the superlative Corsair and Curtiss had spare capacity so into production the Seamew went, and the inexplicably large total of 795 of these unpleasant aircraft were manufactured. If it had been merely slow and uninspiring (which it was) it could have been written off as a humdrum mediocrity but the Seamew was also dangerous. Its main tank could hold 300 gallons of fuel but it couldn’t take off with more than 80 gallons on board. The Ranger engine of the Seamew was prone to regular failure but even were it to run perfectly the Seamew had other nasty tendencies as, according to the ATA pilot Lettice Curtiss, ‘it was possible to take off in an attitude from which it was both impossible to recover and in which there was no aileron control’

The 10 worst British military aircraft here

8. Supermarine Seafire Mk XV

Thoroughbred or mule? The Seafire XV was both (It’s not a horse, Ed.)

The Spitfire’s experience at sea was not a wholly happy one. In the air the Sea-Spitfire retained all the qualities that had made the regular Land-Spitfire such a successful and popular fighter but revealed that the aircraft was essentially just too delicate for the rigours of operating from a carrier deck. The Merlin powered variants were bad enough but the first Griffon-engined Seafires really did not like being on carriers. They had a tendency to veer to the right on take-off, even with full opposite rudder applied, and smashing into the carrier’s island superstructure. Added to this was the unfortunate situation that the undercarriage oleo legs were still the same as the much lighter Merlin engined Spitfires, meaning that the swing was often accompanied by a series of hops as the oleo could not fully cope with the weight and torque of the aircraft. The weak undercarriage also conferred on the Seafire XV a propensity for the propeller tips to ‘peck’ the deck during an arrested landing and on some occasions led to the aircraft bouncing over the arrestor wires completely and into the crash barrier. Not ideal for a carrier aircraft and the RN offloaded the Seafire XVs onto the unsuspecting Canadians and French navies as soon as was possible. Tellingly both the Canadians and the French in turn replaced these aircraft (with the far more sensible Sea Fury and Hellcat respectively) after very brief carrier service.

7. Westland Wyvern

‘Note humped appearance of fuselage’ and terrified appearance of test pilot

A perplexing design described by Harald Penrose, Westland’s chief test pilot, as “very nearly a good aircraft”, the Wyvern suffered from the good old British problem of excessive development time, such that it was nudging obsolescence once committed to service. Part of the reason for this was not the fault of the design at all, the Wyvern had been designed initially to utilise the Rolls-Royce Eagle, a ludicrously complicated 46 litre H-block 24 cylinder sleeve valve piston engine (essentially a bigger Napier Sabre) that first ran in 1944 and delivered an impressive 3200 hp. Sadly for the Wyvern, the Eagle, though not without teething problems, fell victim to the wide-ranging cancellations of military projects immediately following the second world war that in one fell swoop effectively killed all non-turbine projects (even promising ones). Nonetheless, the prototype Wyverns were Eagle-powered, and the sole surviving example is a never-flown example with the Eagle engine. Attention then swung to a promising turboprop, the Rolls-Royce Clyde rated at a lusty 4030 shaft horsepower. Fate was not to be kind to the Wyvern as Rolls-Royce themselves cancelled development of the Clyde due to the tiresome belief that pure jet engines were the way forward. This left but one suitable engine, the Armstrong-Siddeley Python and the Python was pretty woeful for carrier use. Slow spool-up time made for sluggish acceleration and a go-around or wave-off was a risky affair, the engine had a propensity to flame out during catapult launches due to fuel starvation, and although the Python was supposed to be more powerful than the Eagle, the piston-engined prototype achieved a higher maximum speed and greater range than its Python-powered production brethren, a dismal seven years before the Wyvern even entered service. So saddled with a barely adequate power plant, the enormous Wyvern attempted to operate from the decidedly small RN carriers of the 1950s. Weighing 650 pounds shy of a loaded Dakota the Wyvern could not be described as ‘sprightly’ and ultimately its main claim to aviation immortality derives not from any superlative quality of the aeroplane itself but from a desperate desire to escape it: Lt. B. D. Macfarlane made history on 13 October 1954 when he performed the world’s first successful ejection from under water after his aircraft had ditched on launch and been cut in two by the carrier. Of 127 built, 39 were lost to accidents, and despite eight years of development flying, the career of the only turboprop fighter to see service was to last a mere four.