The ‘aluminium origami’ of Marcelle Lobelle. The Barra’s wingfold is actually the same as that of the Fulmar, which looks a lot neater. The Barra’s profusion of protruberances makes it look much more untidy.
As for the Barra’s reputation, a lot of it was just that – reputation. The book ‘Barracuda Pilot’ by Dunstan Hadley suggests that pilots who had been trained from scratch on Barras did a lot better with it than those who had converted from Swordfish or Albacores, and the Barra’s rep for being unsafe came from a pilots trying to manoeuvre the aircraft in a way that would make most monoplanes bite. It did have a few handling quirks, but then so did many combat aircraft.
Let us not forget that the Barracuda could do two things for the Fleet Air Arm that it’s much vaunted US counterpart could not do – it could dive bomb and it could carry a British torpedo (The TBF/TBM, fine aircraft though it undoubtedly was, could not do steep dive bombing, only glide bombing, and its internal weapons bay was too short to accept the standard British ‘fish). The Barra’s results speak for themselves, as does the fact that a large number of Barras were built for the RN, more were built than Swordfish.
Later historians have done the Barra no favours – Norman Polmar suggests it was useless as a combat aircraft, which is very far from the truth and ignores the successes achieved by the aircraft.
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