Fairey Barracuda wings

I prefer my women to have a brain and no sergical enhancements.

Dangerous combination! 😀

“Functionaly Ugly”………….I LOVE IT!. May I use it? For instance; ” All Russian transport aircraft are “functionaly ugly”.” Does that mean there may be a beautifully useless?

I don’t think I made the phrase up and I can’t remember where I got it from so use away by all means.
My working life has been surrounded by the Functionaly Ugly (Contractors Plant and Military Transports) so there’s nowt wrong with Russian transports in my book.
The roles the Barracuda was designed for were never going to result in a thing of beauty, a shoulder wing and enough clerance for a torpedo resulted in an undercarriage that looked like it was designed by a Victorian Railway engineer. But how else could it have been done without a weight penalty or more collapsed gear landings?
Beautifully useless – sounds like a lot like the bimbos who infest the Red top newspapers. Me, I prefer my women to have a brain and no sergical enhancements.

“Functionaly Ugly”………….I LOVE IT!. May I use it? For instance; ” All Russian transport aircraft are “functionaly ugly”.” Does that mean there may be a beautifully useless?

Haha, well said!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Antipodean correction…
“Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder” 🙂

Thanks for the replies. I was not aware of the big window. I have met and interviewed three veterans who flew the Barracuda but they were all pilots and none of them mentioned the window in he bottom.

I had always been under the impression that the Barracuda was considered by the crews as an unsafe, useless and much hated aircraft till I talked with the pilots who flew them. But I was surprised to find that two of the three pilots thought they were fine to fly and quite liked them. The third said they were unsafe, dangerous machines that were killing far too many crews. He was instructing on them at an OTU. He took things into his own hands in the end by grounding all the Barracudas in his school but to his surprise the word spread and within day they had grounded them across the whole Navy, and he said of all the things he’d done in the war (he’d flown with No. 823 Squadron in the desert war – the squadron that invented the Pathfinder target marking technique, etc) this was his proudest moment because he knew he was saving lives. So it’s interesting how there is a sharp division in opinions about the Cuda.

Arguably the nicest looking Barracuda was the Griffon engined Mark V. Unfortunately the flying characteristics were so woefully poor that none were ever issued to a unit.

The position of the wings gave the Observer (naval for Navigator) an unobstructed view downwards through his bubble windows. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I have no objections to the looks of the ‘Cuda – its functionly ugly. There are a lot of aircraft that are ugly and were useless.

I thought that the high wing was to allow a big observation window below it.