7 Worst Aircraft I’ve Flown

When you’ve flown 52 different aircraft types (and counting), you often get asked what your favourite is. So, it was a welcome change when I was asked to choose the ten worst aircraft. No holds barred, the more brutal, the better, was the brief; but, despite my best efforts, I can only think of seven that truly deserve my savaging.

Sure, I’ve flown aircraft with ‘interesting’ handling characteristics that, if ignored, can cause massive embarrassment massive embarrassment and in some cases a not insignificant amount of paperwork (such as being aggressively flicked out of a turn whilst pushing that little too much and thinking “I’ll just sweeten this shot with a touch of VIFF”, or encountering yaw divergence for the first time after rapid rolling for more than the 360 degree limit you’d read somewhere in the Aircrew Manual but completely forgotten about, that sort of thing), and sat in cockpits that defy all logical design criteria and hide essential switches in the most bizarre of places, or place things like ‘weapon jettison’ buttons adjacent to gear buttons and flap levers (thereby increasing the risk of inadvertent jettison when putting the gear down in the dark and leaving a fuel tank or two in someone’s back garden).

“Hovering a Wessex was like trying to hover a semi-detached house from the upstairs bedroom window.”

But does that make them bad aircraft and, hence, the worst to fly? No, that’s just aviation, and having experienced enough variety so far I can compare and contrast and see that repetitive design faults are not deliberate, they just happen. And aerodynamicists don’t purposely make their aircraft dangerous to fly, it’s more that foibles in aircraft handling come about because design compromises have to be made to satisfy an overall design specification. Also, there’s no such thing as a perfect aircraft. It’s a bit like cars – they’ll all get you from A to B in their own unique way, some faster than others, some with higher levels of comfort, some with no comfort at all, and some will inherently pull to one side when you brake, and there’s no international standard when it comes to which side of the steering wheel the indicator stalk lives on. But you get used to all of that and drive accordingly. And so it is with aircraft, but, like cars, some really do stand out from the crowd as unlovable stinkers. So here goes, in no particular order………

Grob Tutor

As a budding RAF pilot, I cut my teeth on the Scottish Aviation Bulldog back in 1988. I didn’t know much as a pilot back then, having only flown the venerable de Havilland Chipmunk and the Cessna 150. But what I did know was that the Bulldog was a joy to fly – with a compact and easy to manage cockpit, agile handling and enough power to fly aerobatics without having to trade height for speed, what more could I want?

Alas, all good things, like civilisation and a bottle of good whisky, come to an end. When the Bulldog went out of service, in stepped the drearily sluggish Grob Tutor. What a contrast – heavy in roll, festooned with checks despite not having much more in the systems department than a Bulldog except for a GPS navigation control unit that alone took hours to get to grips with (the Harrier was easier to flash up and get going), and it always finished aerobatics lower than where it started.

The first time I flew one was 15 years after the Bulldog, 13 years after I joined the RAF, and I’m glad it didn’t figure in any of my flying training. I’ve said it before – would I buy one even if it was the last aircraft on Earth? No, I’d craft an aircraft from coconuts and old bin bags scratch instead.

However, if, and only if, there is a plus side, I suppose it’s passable as a clipped-wing motor glider.

Harrier T.Mk.10 ‘The Hump-Jet’





“What?!” I hear you scream, as you throw your martini at your butler, and spit your tiramisu out in rage,

“Has he gone mad?”

Well, not exactly. The T10 was a two-seat training variant of the excellent Harrier GR7, and there are two reasons why the T10 is on my list – its general inability to hover because of its extra airframe weight and the use of a Pegasus 105 engine that was the same as the lighter GR7’s, so unless stripped of weight (wing stores) and flying on cold, high atmospheric pressure days, forget about attempting all that fun VSTOL stuff. Oh, and one too many seats. Enough said.

Beagle Bassett ‘Shirty Bertie’



This aircraft goes down as the worst aircraft I never flew. Eh? How can that be? Well, ‘Bertie,’ as the Empire Test Pilots’ School Bassett was affectionately known, was a highly modified, variable stability test bed aircraft that until recently was a stalwart of the ETPS fleet.

Capable of simulating the flying characteristics of any other aircraft through the intervention into the right-hand seat flying controls of a very complicated box of tricks on the cabin floor that could be fiddled with and adjusted to change performance through control responses, it really was quite a machine. However, due to the limitation of not allowing the box of tricks to have its say below a minimum height in case it ‘threw a wobbly,’ the person in the right hand seat wasn’t allowed to physically fly Bertie anywhere near the ground. In my capacity as the ETPS Multi-engine Instrument Rating Examiner at the time, it was my job to test the person in the left-hand seat (who had an independent, original, non-modified set of flying controls) and make sure he could fly solely on instruments, predominantly in order to return to an airfield and land in inclement weather.

As a result, the test profile was conducted no higher than about 3000 feet above the ground. And well below the box of tricks minimum height. So despite conducting this annual test around four times at ETPS, I never actually flew Bertie, only in Bertie. And that, as a pilot, is frustrating. Top tip – never fly when you’re angry or frustrated, as it’ll probably mean you rate the experience poorly and end up slagging the aircraft off in an article about the worst ones you’ve flown. (Of course this was not actually Bertie’s fault, bless him, and he’s now enjoying his retirement at the Boscombe Down Aviation Collection).

Westland Wasp ‘Balancing a pyramid on a castor’



As a fixed wing pilot, I’ve been lucky enough to have flown eight helicopters over the years. My first experience was the pre-Harrier hover course, a weeklong stint at RAF Shawbury flying the Squirrel helicopter where my brain was taught how to stop then land, as back then it only knew how to land then stop. And I would suggest that’s quite important ahead of being let loose with a Harrier. Since then, I’ve flown the Agusta Westland 109, Lynx, Gazelle, Jet Ranger III, Schweitzer 300 and the US Navy UH-72, all with helicopter instructors and hence all my hands-on from lifting to landing. As I said, I’ve been very lucky. I like helicopters.

And as luck would have it, one day when I was about to take a Piper Warrior for a flight out of Thruxton airfield near Salisbury, I was offered the opportunity, completely out of the blue, to fly in a Wasp that had just had some maintenance performed on it and needed a check flight after something called ‘blade tracking’. I said I like helicopters, but I don’t profess to understand how they work, but I do appreciate that any angry palm tree/large collection of rotating parts flying in very close formation requires a lot of very special and considered care and attention. So, I wasn’t worried when told that we were going to see how much vibration there might be, and hopefully at acceptable levels. After all, helicopters vibrate even when they stand still, so this was just a matter of keeping it all in check. Anyhow, after a successful take off and flight to assess said vibration, during which I have to say I was quite enamoured by the vintage and overall quirkiness of this little helicopter, I was allowed to fly it back to Thruxton to land. It was during the last four feet of the flight that I began to think, ‘I’m not enjoying this’.

I knew how to hover, how to pick a ground reference just forward of the nose on which to ‘formate’ and stay steady against, and yet I had to choose one dandelion after another as I proceeded to move randomly across the airfield in a desperate attempt to stay put and land. This was quite frustrating (see advice above about flying frustrated), and it dampened my initial attraction to the Wasp, but after some time seemingly having to totally relearn how to fly a helicopter (it’s not really that easy in the first place when you’re a novice, made even harder when your steed seems to have a mind of its own), I landed. Subsequently I asked some former Wasp pilot mates of mine whether I was alone in my inability to hover the damn thing, and they said “No, to begin with its a bit like trying to balance a pyramid upside down on a single castor, but you get used to it!” Ah well, maybe I’ll be lucky again in the future and have a second chance to get used to it, but until then, it’s definitely on the list.

(Another favourite helicopter analogy of mine was hearing how hovering a Wessex was like “trying to hover a semi-detached house from the upstairs bedroom window.” Somehow helicopter mates tend to come out with the best analogies, and I add it here for your delectation).

Boeing 767 ‘The Power Couple’



I’ve only flown the 767 simulator, but due to the fidelity of modern-day simulation, I can only assume the real thing is just as crap. I currently fly the 787-9 as my day job – which, through its fly-by-wire flight control system allows me to hand fly what feels like a big Cessna – and yet I still have to trim the aircraft when changing speeds or changing flap settings, and there’s plenty of feedback, which for any pilot is vitally important. But at least when I put on loads of power to speed up, or conversely take power off to slow down, the aircraft doesn’t try to reach heaven or bury us all in the nearest part of Mother Earth.

Because that’s what a 767 tries to do.

The ‘pitch/power couple’ as it’s called (an aircraft’s want to pitch up with power, or nose down on power reduction) is alarmingly strong on a 767. I’d been warned about it in the briefing before the simulator session (and that alone speaks volumes about this Boeing design), and sure enough, what a handful. There’s something quite alarming about having to dial nose down trim in as you accelerate such that you’re still having to push hard whilst doing so. Let alone pull like a dingbat whilst decelerating as the trim can’t operate fast enough. Overall, sub-optimal, and I’ll stick with my 787, thank you very much.

(Incidentally, my venerable old 747-400 didn’t behave anywhere near as badly either, so what was going on in the 767 planning meetings is anyone’s guess, and my ex-737 colleagues speak of similar things there).

Short Tucano TMk 1



Before I start pulling the Tucano to pieces, I just want to say that I loved flying it. I flew it as a student, so I have some lovely memories of flying solo as high as 25,000ft, strapped to an ejection seat, pulling up to 6g without a g-suit. And I was an instructor on it for my first tour in the RAF, as well as at Empire Test Pilots’ School as their Standards pilot. I flew it to Sweden, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, France and all over the UK. I thoroughly enjoyed flying aerobatics in it, and never had a major emergency in it.

So, how come it’s on this list? When I talk to friends and colleagues about their memories of the Tucano, it’s the worst aircraft they’ve ever flown, so by democractic principles, it’s also one of mine. It has to be, right? It wasn’t a jet, so totally inferior to the Jet Provost it replaced, and the secondary effects of being propellor driven meant it never had ‘jet-like handling’ despite what it said in the Embraer sales catalogue. Its build quality was a little suspect, for sure, but it wasn’t my airbrake that fell off. Apparently, it could have done with automatic rudder trim to compensate for the torque effect of 1100 shaft horsepower, but to be fair using the electric rudder trim on the throttle wasn’t exactly arduous. So according to everyone else, the Tucano was one of the worst aircraft I’ve flown. But actually, according to me, she was one of the nicest and I miss her.

Klemm Kl.25



In another case of being in the right place at the right time, a very good friend of mine was given the responsibility, and it was a huge one, of periodically airing a Klemm 25 down in Wiltshire. Built in Germany between the wars, the Klemm 25 was officially branded as a ‘light leisure, sports and training aircraft’ and no doubt was used to train quite a few ‘civilian’ pilots to get around those pesky Treaty of Versailles rules that prevented Germany from training pilots for a Luftwaffe it wasn’t supposed to have.

 Removable wings are quite handy if you don’t own an airfield, or if your hangar is a bit on the small side, and especially useful in the ‘30s when you could tow your aircraft home and park it on the drive. I’m pretty sure if you did that today, well, you can probably imagine what would happen, you’d get Arts Council funding granted and be bothered by culture-vultures treading on your flowerbeds, but I digress.

I found myself standing in a field watching the wings being attached and on closer inspection I began to realise that ‘basic’ is an understatement when it comes to describing the work of Herr Hanns Klemm back in 1928.

Accustomed as I am to all the mod cons and electronic wizardry of 21st century aviation, the Klemm is akin to comparing a 1969 Hillman Imp to a Bentley Continental GT – in an Imp you’re not sure when you insert the key whether it’ll start or not, electronics hadn’t even been invented for the motor car when it was made, you better have a mechanically sympathetic driving style as well as an ear for impending mechanical doom, and best wear a coat as it’ll be cold (no such worries with a Bentley).

And so, it was with the Klemm. Noisy, windy, I couldn’t hear a word Charlie was saying in the front seat as there was no intercom, and no instruments to speak of – there was an airspeed indicator, a clock, an engine rpm gauge, a compass, and a rate of climb and descent indicator. That was it. The Klemm is a true seat—of-the-pants aircraft (as well as just being a pants aircraft) and you have to rely on senses you have but rarely call upon in order to fly it, and I freely admit that I was out of my comfort zone. But am I complaining unduly? Probably, as it is of its time and some 600-odd were built, which even by today’s standards of small aircraft production is really quite an achievement. So, is it truly one of the worst aircraft I’ve flown? I suppose only when compared to aircraft that came after it, and that’s like using hindsight when analysing a historical event and suggesting it would have happened differently had one been involved.

I was very lucky to fly the Klemm, it gave me my one and only insight to date into the very early days of aviation and just how actually cutting edge it would have been almost 100 years ago. And yes, I own a 1969 Hillman Imp that I wouldn’t trade for a Bentley Continental GT even if you paid me because it’s good, clean, honest fun to drive and reminds me of the basics.



So there you have it, my take on what I think are the worst (and indeed not actually worst at all) aircraft I’ve flown to date. My opinion, my list, and I’m sure I’ll get an email or three from some real Tucano haters, and that’s fine.

But as Air Marshall of Necromancy in the Hushkonian Air Force, watch out…….

Matt Doncaster, 787 pilot, former Harrier pilot and Air Marshall of Necromancy in the Hushkonian Air Force

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