I had a birthday recently, and somebody gave me a book called The World’s Worst Aircraft. There are, it turns out, at least three books with that name, though you would suppose that one, or possibly even none, would have been enough. The project of identifying a distinct group of “worst” aircraft labors under the same curse as those idiotic People magazine nominations of the sexiest man or woman in the world. To start with, sexiness is a completely subjective and indefinable standard; then, you know they didn’t check out all of the men or women in the world; and if they had, it is impossible that there would not be at least a three-way — if not a three-million-way — tie.
So it is with “worst” aircraft. There are no fixed standards; most of the truly hopeless specimens have sunk without a trace; and it is impossible to say why an airplane that made the list is distinctly worse than many that didn’t. The author of the book I received dismisses his project as a mere lark, good just for laughs. He is too kind.
