Fairey! Fairey!

DESCRIPTION: "Fairey! Fairey! Give my your answer, do. What is wrong with My Barracuda II?" The plane keeps developing defects. Many are grounded. When the plane falls apart, "I'll jump out quick And bring my stick And stuff it right up you."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1976 (Page-ForGawdsakeDontTakeMe)
KEYWORDS: technology humorous warning derivative
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Page-ForGawdsakeDontTakeMe, p. 69, "Fairey! Fairey" (1 text, tune referenced)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Bicycle Built for Two (Daisy Bell)" (tune) and references there
cf. "Old Iron" (subject of the Barracuda II)
cf. "Such a Fucking Crate" (subject of the Barracuda II)
NOTES [1096 words]: The plane so disparaged in this and several other items printed by Page-ForGawdsakeDontTakeMe is the Fairey Barracuda torpedo bomber, and, like C. S. Lewis's Eustace Clarence Scrubb, it "almost deserved" what it was called.
The British had invented the aircraft carrier during World War I, but when the Royal Air Force was formed, it took control of all military aircraft including carrier planes. The RAF didn't let the navy develop good carrier planes, and the Royal Navy didn't regain control of its aircraft until 1939 (Worth, p. 79). The result was that the RN went into World War II with planes that were extremely impressive -- for 1912 or so. The Gloster Sea Gladiator was a biplane "fighter" that was slower than the bombers it was supposed to chase. The Skua fighter-bomber was a monoplane, but it resembled a snake that had swallowed a very large meal more than a bird of prey; it was slow and awkward and couldn't carry a big bomb load. In that company, the torpedo plane, the Fairey Swordfish, almost looked good: It was reliable, and could survive extreme damage. But it was a biplane with a top speed of 138 miles per hour (Munson, p. 68).
Even the British knew that the Swordfish needed a replacement. So they turned to Fairey again, and it gave them the Fairey Albacore -- another biplane, slightly faster than the Swordfish (161 miles per hour) but otherwise so achingly bad that it went out of service before the Swordfish did (Munson, p. 62; Worth, p. 81). For the clunk that was the Albacore, see the notes to "He'll Never Fly Home Again."
Despite that, the British yet again allowed Fairey to design another torpedo bomber for them. This was the Fairey Barracuda, and it was actually an improvement on the Swordfish -- except that enemy equipment had also improved in the interim, so the Barracuda, although a monoplane and much faster than its predecessors, was still a clunk by the time it entered service. "Although design of the Barracuda was begun in 1937, the aircraft did not enter F. A. A. service until six years later" (Munson, p. 63). "[T]he Fairey Barracuda (Mark II, speed: 228 mph, armament: two .303cal m[achine] g[uns]. one 17.7 inch torpedo or 1,500 lbs of bombs) [was] an obvious advance, yet still something of a disappointment. Not an easy plane to fly, it suffered several accidents due to its handling flaws. Its engine lacked power. The meager armament left pilots without a forward-facing gun" (Worth, p. 81. I believe, based on SharpeEtAl, p. 228, that the correct statement is that the plane had no guns that faced the rear, the direction from which bombers were usually attacked ). By comparison, its American contemporary, the Grumman Avenger, could fly at 271 mph, and had three .50 caliber machine guns and two .303 guns, able to fire both forward and behind, and had a much longer range (Munson, p. 86).
Brown, who tested many British naval aircraft, on p. 99 describes his shock at seeing such an ungainly aircraft for the first time. Brown, p. 101, calls it very slow to climb, and had sticky controls. The pilots actually had to learn a whole new technique to fire her torpedo; the standard method was likely to result in crashes (Brown, pp. 103-106); indeed, on p. 100, Brown says that this torpedo plane's torpedo "was never used by the Barracuda in action." Such combat as it actually saw was with bombs. And even for that, it often needed catapult or JATO assistance to get off small carrier decks (Taylor, p. 318).
The irony is that the British had rushed the design, then sat on it before putting the plane in production to concentrate on other planes (Taylor, p. 312). Presumably if they'd given more design time, they would have gotten a better plane, or if they had gotten their hastily-developed mess into pilots' hands a year earlier, it wouldn't have looked like such a clunk. As Taylor says on p. 312, "It was criticized not only by the uninformed -- who objected to its quaint appearance on the ground and to the aerodynamically defeating clutter of equipment dictated by naval requirements -- but also by the well-informed."
SharpeEtAl, p. 229, says of it, "As ugly as sin and only tolerated by its crews, fortunately the 'Barra' was not often exposed to enemy fighters."
The Barracuda did perform useful work -- it was one of the aircraft that attacked the TIrpitz in Norway, and a number of modifications were available to suit it for uses other than torpedo bombing (Munson, p. 63), but you really have to wonder why the British, if they couldn't find anything better, didn't just license the Avenger. Keeping the thing in service really was a disservice to the crews.
One of its crazier proposed uses was to drop paratroops. They stuck two guys in cargo pods, then dropped them. Like many of the other uses of the Barracuda, this proved a flop: "Successful live drops were made, but the plan was abandoned when it was realized that the psychological effects on the paratroopers -- cooped up for relatively long periods in the nacelles -- was too severe to be acceptable" (Taylor, p. 318).
There are several songs in Page-ForGawdsakeDontTakeMe about the Barracuda, with different facts about the plane.
"Old Iron" says:
-- "Torpedoing a fleet." It hardly torpedoed a fleet, since there weren't enough German ships to make a fleet, but it was a torpedo bomber and it did torpedo the Tirpitz.
-- "Weighs six tons, no front guns." The loaded weight of a Barracuda II is listed by Munson as 13,916 pounds, so six tons is about right. The lack of forward-firing guns is covered above.
-- "The engine is a teased Rolls Roys, A Merlin 32" -- This is correct; the Barracuda used a 1640 horse power Merlin 32 engine. The Merlin was one of the best airplane engines of World War II, but it couldn't make up for the airframe around it!
"Such a Fucking Crate" says:
'-- "Observer and air gunner Weigh down this seven-tonner." The Barracuda normally had a crew of three: Pilot, observer (who might operate the radio or navigate or serve other functions) and gunner. As noted above, the fully loaded craft weighed between six and seven tons, so this line is slightly exaggerated but accurate to the nearest ton.
-- "High-strutted tailplane very out of date." The tailplane, carrying the elevators, is indeed very high on the rudder and has support struts. The high tailplane isn't unique (the later Gloster Meteor had one almost as high), but I can't recall seeing an aircraft with a high tailplane and struts.
-- "High wing." -- The Barracuda's wing was, indeed, very high, roughly level with the cockpit. - RBW
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