By the late 1930s the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm still went to war in open-cockpit biplanes. The Fairey Swordfish and its intended successor, the Fairey Albacore, were fabric-covered, fixed-undercarriage machines that looked — and flew — like relics of the previous war. The Admiralty knew it needed a modern, all-metal monoplane to carry torpedoes and dive-bombs from its carriers. The aircraft it got, the Fairey Barracuda, would be one of the most awkward-looking warplanes of the conflict, and one of the most misunderstood.

The Barracuda answered Specification S.24/37. It was Fairey’s first monoplane torpedo bomber: an all-metal, shoulder-winged aircraft with a deep, slab-sided fuselage, a tall undercarriage to give a torpedo ground clearance, and a distinctive tailplane braced high on the fin to keep it clear of the wing’s wake. Most striking of all were the large Fairey-Youngman flaps beneath the wing, which could be lowered for take-off and landing and angled down to act as dive brakes. The result was an aeroplane that almost everyone agreed was ugly — a jumble of struts, flaps and angles that crews affectionately, or not so affectionately, mocked.

Its development was painfully slow. The Barracuda had been designed around the Rolls-Royce Exe, a 24-cylinder sleeve-valve engine that promised smooth power. When the Exe was abandoned so that Rolls-Royce could concentrate on the Merlin, the whole aircraft had to be re-engineered around the lower-set Merlin instead. That, the fall of France re-ordering Britain’s aircraft priorities, and the sheer novelty of the design pushed the first flight back to December 1940 and front-line service to 1943 — years later than the Navy had hoped.

“It was never going to win a beauty contest — but over Kaafjord in April 1944 the Barracuda did something no Swordfish could have done.”On Operation Tungsten and the strikes against the Tirpitz

When it did arrive, the Barracuda was heavy and, with the Merlin, somewhat underpowered — a shortfall that became acute in the heat of the tropics, where its range and bomb load fell away sharply. Early in its career the type also suffered a spate of unexplained fatal accidents, aircraft diving into the sea for no obvious reason. The causes were argued over at the time and since: control or hydraulic problems, structural limits in the dive, or aircrew blacking out under high g were all suggested, and the truth was probably a combination that has never been pinned down with certainty.

And yet the Barracuda did important, sometimes decisive, work. Flying from Royal Navy fleet carriers, Barracudas dive-bombed the German battleship Tirpitz in her Norwegian fjord and put her out of action for months. They struck Japanese-held targets in Sumatra with the Eastern and British Pacific Fleets, hunted U-boats over the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and covered amphibious landings. It was, in the end, a workmanlike aircraft that history has treated more harshly than its record deserves.

Part of the reason the Barracuda is remembered so unkindly is timing. It arrived in the middle of a war in which naval aviation was changing faster than at any point before or since, and it was overtaken almost as soon as it appeared. American industry was pouring out the Grumman Avenger, a bigger, longer-legged, more reliable torpedo bomber, and Britain received it in quantity through Lend-Lease. Placed beside the Avenger the Barracuda looked exactly what it was: a home-grown compromise, competent but outclassed, kept in production because it existed and worked rather than because it was the best available. That is a hard reputation to shake, and the Barracuda never has.

But reputations built on comparison can be unfair. The Barracuda has to be judged against the biplanes it actually replaced, not only the American monoplanes that eventually replaced it. Measured that way it was a genuine step forward: faster, better protected, able to dive-bomb accurately, and flexible enough to carry radar, mines, depth charges or an airborne lifeboat as the mission demanded. For two critical years in the middle of the war it was one of the standard strike aircraft of the Royal Navy’s carriers, and in that time it earned a place in history that its awkward looks and short career have tended to obscure.

The Barracuda’s story is, at heart, an engine story. Fairey drew the aircraft around the Rolls-Royce Exe (also called the Boreas), an air-cooled 24-cylinder X-block sleeve-valve engine that was expected to give around 1,200 hp with unusual smoothness. But the Exe was experimental, its development ran into trouble, and Rolls-Royce — stretched by the demands of the Merlin for Spitfires, Hurricanes and bombers — abandoned it. The Barracuda had to be re-worked around the Merlin, an engine that sat differently, weighed differently and, crucially, gave the heavy naval aircraft only just enough power.

Successive Merlin marks were fitted — the Merlin 30 in the Mk I, the more powerful Merlin 32 with a four-blade propeller in the Mk II — but no version of the Barracuda ever felt over-endowed with power. The final Mk V turned to the much larger Rolls-Royce Griffon, but by then the war was over and the moment had passed. The name followed Fairey’s habit of naming aircraft after fish and creatures — Swordfish, Albacore, Firefly, Fulmar — the barracuda being a fast, predatory fish, a more flattering image than the aircraft’s looks suggested.

It is easy, in hindsight, to blame the Merlin for the Barracuda’s shortcomings, but that is not quite fair to the engine. The Merlin was one of the great aero-engines of the century; the problem was that it was being asked to haul a heavy, draggy naval aircraft loaded with a torpedo, three crew and a mass of equipment, when it had been optimised as a fighter engine. Every extra pound the Navy hung on the airframe — radar, armour, folding gear, rescue equipment — ate further into a power margin that was never generous. In cold northern air the aircraft coped; in the heat and humidity of the tropics, where engines make less power and wings less lift, the margin all but vanished, and the Barracuda’s range and load fell to the point where the Americans’ Avenger simply had to take over.

The Exe episode also tells a wider story about wartime engineering. Britain could not afford to develop every promising idea at once, and when hard choices had to be made the Merlin — proven, in mass production, and needed everywhere — won every time. The Exe, the Vulture and several other ambitious engines fell by the wayside, and aircraft designed around them, the Barracuda among them, had to make do. The Barracuda is, in that sense, a monument to a decision that was probably correct for the war as a whole even though it left one particular aeroplane permanently short of breath.

For all its fame resting on a single mark and a single mission, the Barracuda actually evolved through a clear sequence of versions, each shaped by hard operational lessons. The early Mk I was really a stepping-stone; the Mk II was the aircraft that did the fighting; the Mk III specialised in the patient anti-submarine war; and the post-war Mk V was an attempt to fix the type’s fundamental lack of power that arrived just as the whole piston-engined carrier era was ending. Reading the marks in order is, in effect, reading the aircraft’s attempt to overcome the compromises built into it from the start.

Meeting the Fleet Air Arm’s demand for a modern strike aircraft meant building the Barracuda in numbers that a single factory could not manage. Fairey Aviation, the designer, built the aircraft at its own works, but the bulk of production was farmed out to a group of established manufacturers: Blackburn Aircraft, Boulton Paul and Westland all built Barracudas under contract. This kind of dispersed, sub-contracted production was standard practice in wartime Britain, spreading the work, reducing the risk of a single factory being knocked out, and drawing on labour and floor-space across the aircraft industry.

The definitive Mk II accounted for the great majority of the roughly 2,500–2,600 aircraft built, with the radar-equipped Mk III next most numerous and the early Mk I and post-war Mk V produced only in small quantities. Because the totals are drawn from the records of several firms and many separate contracts, published figures differ — which is why any honest account gives the production run as an approximate range rather than a single precise number.

The Barracuda’s production also has to be seen against the flood of American aircraft arriving under Lend-Lease. Even as British factories turned out Barracudas, the Royal Navy was receiving Grumman Avengers and other US types that were, in several respects, better suited to the job. That Britain kept building the Barracuda anyway reflects both national self-sufficiency in aircraft production and the simple fact that a working, available aircraft in the hand was worth a great deal in the middle of a war.

Contemporary pilots’ accounts paint the Barracuda as a heavy, honest aircraft that demanded attention but rewarded a careful hand. On the ground it sat high and nose-up, so taxiing needed care and forward visibility was limited — a familiar penalty for a tail-wheel aircraft with a torpedo’s worth of clearance built in. Getting airborne from a carrier deck, especially loaded and in warm air, was a deliberate business; the aircraft used its Youngman flaps to claw its way off, and pilots learned not to ask more of the Merlin than it could give.

In the air the Barracuda was stable and reasonably pleasant to handle at cruising speeds, if never sprightly. Its party trick was the dive. With the flaps set to their steep, negative “dive-brake” angle, the aircraft could be pushed over into a genuine dive-bombing attack and held there at a controlled speed, giving the pilot time to aim without the machine running away or over-stressing itself in the pull-out. This was unusual for a torpedo-carrying aircraft and was the single capability that made attacks like Operation Tungsten possible. Flown well, within its limits, it was a precise bombing platform.

The flip side was that near those limits the Barracuda could be unforgiving, and the unexplained early dive accidents cast a long shadow over how confidently crews approached steep attacks in the type’s first months. Deck landing, the perennial test of any naval aircraft, was regarded as manageable: the good downward visibility from the cockpit helped, and the sturdy undercarriage soaked up the arrival, though the aircraft’s weight meant there was little margin for a badly judged approach. Overall the picture that emerges is of a workmanlike aeroplane — not a thoroughbred, but a sound tool in trained hands.

Operation Tungsten, 3 April 1944. This was the Barracuda’s finest hour. The German battleship Tirpitz, a constant threat to Arctic convoys, lay repairing in Kaafjord in northern Norway. Two waves of Barracudas — several dozen aircraft flying from Royal Navy carriers including HMS Victorious and HMS Furious, escorted by fighters — dive-bombed the ship at anchor. They scored around a dozen or more direct hits, killed and wounded hundreds of the crew and put Tirpitz out of action for months, all for very light losses. It was one of the most successful carrier strikes of the European war, and further Barracuda raids (Operations Mascot and Goodwood) followed through the summer.

The Pacific and Indian Ocean. With the Eastern Fleet and later the British Pacific Fleet, Barracudas struck Japanese-held oil facilities and airfields around Sumatra and at Sabang in 1944 (Operations Cockpit and Sunfish). Here the aircraft’s weaknesses showed: in tropical heat its performance, range and bomb load fell away, and it was progressively replaced by the American Grumman Avenger for Pacific operations.

Atlantic and Mediterranean. Barracudas, especially the radar-equipped Mk III, flew anti-submarine and convoy-protection patrols from escort carriers, and provided cover and strike for amphibious operations including the Salerno landings of September 1943. This maritime patrol work — long, cold, uneventful hours punctuated by sudden action — was arguably the aircraft’s most sustained contribution, even though it left almost no mark on popular memory. Keeping a convoy’s escort carrier air group flying in the North Atlantic was a grind of bad weather, pitching decks and constant vigilance, and the Barracuda, with its endurance, crew station and radar, was well suited to it.

After the war. The Barracuda was quickly overtaken. It soldiered on in second-line and training roles into the 1950s, and small numbers served briefly with the Royal Canadian Navy (aboard HMCS Warrior from 1946) and the French Aeronavale before disappearing almost entirely.

The Barracuda is best understood alongside the aircraft it replaced and those it flew beside. It succeeded the Fairey Swordfish and Albacore — both biplanes — and represented a genuine generational leap for the Fleet Air Arm, even if its looks and performance never inspired the affection the “Stringbag” Swordfish earned. Against the American Grumman TBF Avenger, the standard Allied carrier torpedo bomber of the later war, the Barracuda came off second best on range, load and reliability, which is why the Avenger increasingly took over front-line duties in the Pacific.

As a dive bomber it invites comparison with the American Douglas SBD Dauntless and Curtiss SB2C Helldiver; the Barracuda was slower and more lightly built but uniquely combined torpedo and dive-bombing roles in one carrier airframe. Its true peer group, though, is the small club of aircraft judged mainly on a single spectacular success: like the Doolittle B-25s or the Dam Busters’ Lancasters, the Barracuda is remembered above all for one operation — the strikes on Tirpitz.

It is worth pausing on the Japanese comparison too. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s carrier torpedo bomber, the Nakajima B5N “Kate”, was faster and longer-ranged than the Barracuda but far more lightly protected; the later B6N “Jill” narrowed the gap further. Set against these, the Barracuda’s modest performance looks less like British incompetence and more like the general truth that a single-engined carrier aircraft asked to do everything — torpedo, dive-bomb, scout and hunt submarines — will always be a compromise. Nations that specialised their carrier types tended to get better individual aircraft; Britain, short of resources and carrier deck space, asked one airframe to do the lot, and the Barracuda is what that philosophy produced.

There is also the question of what came next. The Barracuda’s intended Fleet Air Arm successor, the Fairey Spearfish, was a much larger and more powerful aircraft that never entered service, cancelled as the war ended and jet aircraft loomed. In that sense the Barracuda was the last of a line: the final British piston-engined carrier strike aircraft to see major service, standing at the very end of the era it had helped begin when it retired the biplanes.

The Barracuda’s legacy is oddly quiet for an aircraft with such a dramatic high point. Because it was retired quickly, disliked by some of its crews and overshadowed by more glamorous types, almost none were preserved — a fate it shares with several worthy but unloved wartime aircraft. That near-total disappearance is itself part of the story: the Barracuda is the classic example of a machine that did serious work and then vanished from public memory.

Several myths cling to it. One is that it was simply a bad aeroplane; in truth it was a competent, strong, multi-role naval type hampered by a weak power-to-weight ratio and a difficult birth. Another is that it achieved nothing; the Tirpitz strikes alone disprove that. A third is that its accident record marks it as a death-trap; the early dive losses were serious but were not typical of its whole service life, much of which was unremarkable maritime patrol and strike work.

The Barracuda has, in recent years, begun a modest rehabilitation among aviation historians and enthusiasts — helped, ironically, by its very rarity. The Fleet Air Arm Museum’s reconstruction project has drawn fresh attention to an aircraft most people had forgotten, and a run of well-researched documentaries and articles has encouraged a more balanced view. The story that emerges is not one of triumph or disaster, but of a workmanlike, honestly flawed aircraft that did its job in a fast-moving war and then quietly disappeared — which is, in its way, more interesting than either the caricature or the whitewash.

If there is a single lesson in the Barracuda’s legacy, it is about how reputations form. An aircraft that looks graceful and is wrapped in glamour — the Spitfire, the Mustang — is remembered fondly almost regardless of the details. An aircraft that looks ungainly, arrives late and is retired quickly gets written off, even when it did serious work. The Barracuda is the standing example of the second category, and correcting the record on it is a small act of historical fairness.

A Barracuda went to war with three men. The pilot flew the aircraft and aimed the torpedo or bombs; the observer, seated in the middle under the long canopy with an excellent downward view, handled navigation, spotting and radio direction; the telegraphist air gunner worked the radio and manned the rear guns. On anti-submarine marks the observer also operated the ASV radar, hunting surfaced U-boats by night and in poor weather.

In the strike role the Barracuda could carry a standard 18-inch aerial torpedo slung beneath the fuselage, or a mix of bombs up to six 250-pounders, or depth charges and mines. Attacks were made either as a low torpedo run or, using the Youngman flaps as dive brakes, as a steep dive-bombing pass — the technique used against Tirpitz. Some aircraft carried flares for night work or an airborne lifeboat for air-sea rescue, underlining how much the Fleet Air Arm asked of a single airframe.

The torpedo attack and the dive-bombing attack asked almost opposite things of a crew. A torpedo run had to be flown low, straight and slow, holding a steady course toward the target while every gun in range concentrated on the approaching aircraft — the classic, nerve-shredding profile that had made the Swordfish crews of Taranto and the Bismarck chase famous. A dive-bombing attack, by contrast, meant hauling the aircraft up, rolling into a steep dive with the flaps braking the speed, holding the aim as the ship swelled in the sight, releasing, and pulling out hard before the sea or the flak got you. That the same aircraft and the same crews could do both is a real, if under-appreciated, tribute to the Barracuda’s flexibility.

Sitting behind it all was the observer’s navigation. Carrier operations depend on being able to find a small, moving airfield in a large, featureless ocean, often in bad weather and radio silence, after a strike that may have scattered the formation. The Barracuda’s roomy observer’s station, good downward visibility and, on radar marks, its ASV set made it a capable platform for exactly this kind of work — which is why so much of its actual career was spent not attacking battleships but flying long, patient reconnaissance, spotting and anti-submarine patrols that never made the newsreels.

The Barracuda story runs mark by mark. The Mk I, underpowered with its Merlin 30, was really a service-test aircraft. The Mk II, with the Merlin 32 and a four-blade propeller, was the version that fought the important battles — it was Mk IIs that struck the Tirpitz from HMS Victorious and Furious. The radar-equipped Mk III, easily recognised by the bulged radome under its tail, specialised in the patient, unglamorous business of anti-submarine patrol from escort carriers. The Griffon-engined Mk V, longer and cleaner, came only at the very end and in tiny numbers.

Across those marks the Barracuda embarked on a long list of Royal Navy carriers — fleet carriers like Victorious, Furious, Formidable, Indefatigable and Illustrious, and smaller escort carriers — and served with numerous Naval Air Squadrons at home, in the Mediterranean and East of Suez. It was, for a couple of critical years, one of the standard aircraft of Britain’s carrier fleet.

Production was spread across four manufacturers to reach the numbers the Navy wanted. Fairey built the aircraft at its own works, but the bulk of Mk IIs and IIIs came from Blackburn and Boulton Paul, with Westland contributing a smaller share. This kind of dispersed, sub-contracted production was typical of Britain’s wartime aircraft industry, and it is one reason the exact total built is quoted differently by different sources — the paperwork of several firms and many contracts does not always add up neatly. The commonly seen figures of roughly 2,500 to 2,600 aircraft should be read as the best consensus rather than a precise count.

The Mk III’s radar deserves a note of its own. Fitting ASV (air-to-surface-vessel) radar in a radome under the rear fuselage turned the Barracuda from a daylight strike aircraft into an all-weather submarine hunter, able to find a surfaced U-boat at night or in cloud and then attack it with depth charges. It was slow, cold, exhausting work flown from small escort carriers in the Atlantic, and it never made headlines, but it was exactly the sort of maritime patrol that kept the convoys moving — and it is a side of the Barracuda’s career that the Tirpitz story tends to eclipse.

Behind the specifications were the Fleet Air Arm squadrons and the young aircrew who flew from pitching decks in the Arctic and the tropics. Units such as Nos. 827, 829, 810, 847 and many others took the Barracuda into action; their crews learned to nurse a heavy aircraft off a short deck, to hold a steady dive under fire, and to trust an aeroplane that had, early on, killed some of their friends for reasons no one could fully explain. The strikes on Tirpitz were flown by ordinary naval airmen in their early twenties, pressing home dive attacks through flak in a fjord ringed by mountains.

That human context is why the Barracuda deserves more than a punchline about its looks. For the men who flew and maintained it, it was simply the tool they had — imperfect, demanding, but capable of doing something that mattered on the day it counted most.

The units themselves tell part of the story. Squadrons re-equipped from Swordfish and Albacores had to learn a wholly new kind of aircraft — monoplane handling, hydraulics, folding wings, dive-bombing technique — often at speed and under wartime pressure, before embarking to fight. Some worked up in the cold of home waters for the Norway strikes; others trained for the heat and distance of the Indian Ocean and Pacific. Each had to master not just the flying but the whole choreography of carrier operations with a big, heavy aircraft, from ranging and arming on a crowded deck to recovering a scattered strike in poor weather. It was, in every sense, a demanding aircraft to bring to war.

Deck crews had their own relationship with the aircraft. The Barracuda was tall, heavy and awkward to move, and ranging a deck full of them for a strike — folding and spreading wings, arming torpedoes and bombs, fuelling and marshalling in the cold spray of a northern morning — was hard, dangerous physical work. The observers, meanwhile, occupied a curious middle-of-the-aircraft world under the long canopy, surrounded by charts, radio and radar sets, largely trusting the pilot with their lives while they did the navigation that got the formation to a target the size of a ship in a fjord and back to a moving carrier afterwards. Naval aviation has always been a team effort, and the Barracuda, with its crew of three and its small army of deck and hangar personnel, was a particularly team-dependent aircraft.

It is also worth remembering how young everyone was. The pilots pressing home dive attacks on the Tirpitz through mountain-ringed flak, the observers hunched over their instruments, the gunners watching the sky astern — most were in their late teens or early twenties, trained at speed and thrown into some of the most demanding flying of the war. Whatever the aircraft’s failings, the standard of airmanship its crews reached in it was remarkable, and the type’s successes belong at least as much to them as to Fairey’s drawing office.

Look past the awkward silhouette and the Barracuda is a logical piece of naval engineering, every part of it answering a requirement of carrier flying. The all-metal fuselage was a slab-sided box, deep enough to house three crew in tandem and strong enough to take the shock of arrested landings and steep dives. Behind the pilot sat the observer, the tactical brain of the aircraft, with charts, radio and — on radar marks — the ASV set; behind him, facing aft, the telegraphist air gunner worked the wireless and the rear guns. The long, framed “greenhouse” canopy that ran the length of this arrangement gave superb all-round and downward visibility, which mattered enormously for navigation and for spotting ships and submarines.

The wing was the aircraft’s defining feature. Mounted high on the shoulder to keep it and its flaps clear of a slung torpedo, it was an all-metal, two-spar structure that folded hydraulically outboard of the main spar so the aircraft could be struck down into a carrier’s hangar. Beneath it hung the Fairey-Youngman flaps — large auxiliary aerofoils on external arms that could be lowered for lift or angled down as dive brakes. It was these, more than anything, that gave the Barracuda its cluttered look and its unusual dual torpedo-and-dive-bomber capability.

The undercarriage was tall and narrow, sprung to absorb deck landings and set high to give the torpedo clearance; the tailwheel was likewise sturdy, for the aircraft sat markedly nose-up on the ground. The tail itself was carried high on the fin and braced with struts, keeping the horizontal surfaces out of the turbulent air shed by the wing and flaps — another sensible solution that added to the aircraft’s ungainly appearance. Under the belly and wings were the racks and crutches for the aircraft’s war load: a torpedo, bombs, depth charges, mines, flares, or the containers and lifeboats of the air-sea rescue role.

Powering all of this was a single Rolls-Royce Merlin, driving a three- or four-blade propeller depending on the mark, fed from fuel tanks in the fuselage and wings. It was a clean, conventional installation of an outstanding engine — and the fact that even so the aircraft was underpowered says everything about how much the Fleet Air Arm had asked one airframe to carry.

There is no complete, original Fairey Barracuda anywhere in the world — a striking fact for an aircraft built in the thousands. None was set aside for preservation when the type was scrapped, and for decades the Barracuda existed only in photographs and in scattered relics.

Today the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton is working to change that, assembling recovered wrecks and components — parts pulled from crash sites and the sea — into a single representative airframe. It is a long-term reconstruction rather than a restoration of one surviving aircraft, and it has been described as a years-long “giant jigsaw”. If it succeeds, it will give the public the only Barracuda they can stand in front of. Until then, the honest answer to “where can I see one?” is: nowhere intact yet — but a reconstruction is slowly taking shape.

The project draws on parts recovered over many years — airframe sections pulled from crash sites, components salvaged from the sea, and pieces held in store — combined with newly manufactured structure where nothing original survives. It is painstaking, expensive and slow, dependent on funding and volunteer expertise, and it has attracted public support including high-profile visits. Whether one calls the result a “survivor” is partly a matter of definition: it will be a genuine Barracuda assembled from real Barracuda parts, but not a single aircraft that came down through the decades intact. Either way, it will be the closest thing the world has to a complete example, and a fitting memorial to an aircraft that has been unfairly forgotten.

Step back from the individual battles and the Barracuda occupies a specific, important place in the history of the Fleet Air Arm. It was the aircraft that finally took British naval aviation out of the biplane era for the strike role — the bridge between the fabric-and-wire world of the Swordfish and Albacore and the powerful, specialised carrier aircraft of the post-war years. For all its faults, that transitional role was genuinely significant: someone had to make the leap to the all-metal monoplane, and for the Royal Navy’s torpedo and dive-bombing squadrons, that aircraft was the Barracuda.

It also embodied a distinctly British approach to carrier aviation. Where the United States and Japan built specialised carrier aircraft — separate torpedo bombers, dive bombers and scouts — Britain, with fewer carriers, less deck space and stretched resources, tended to ask a single airframe to do everything. The Barracuda was the purest expression of that philosophy: torpedo bomber, dive bomber, reconnaissance aircraft and submarine hunter rolled into one ungainly package. That it did all of these jobs adequately, rather than any of them superbly, is a fair criticism of the individual aircraft — but also an honest reflection of the constraints the Royal Navy worked under.

Finally, the Barracuda stands as a reminder that the aircraft history remembers are not always the ones that mattered most on a given day. The Swordfish is loved, the Spitfire adored, the Avenger respected; the Barracuda is mocked or forgotten. Yet on 3 April 1944 it was a force of Barracudas, not any of those more famous types, that flew into a Norwegian fjord and crippled the most powerful warship in the German navy. An aircraft capable of that has earned its place in the record, whatever it looked like.

The Fairey Barracuda is easy to caricature: ugly, late, underpowered, prone to mysterious crashes, and gone almost without trace. Each charge holds some truth. But reduce the aircraft to those faults and you miss the point. This was the machine that dragged the Fleet Air Arm out of the biplane age, that could carry a torpedo one day and dive-bomb a battleship the next, and that on 3 April 1944 flew into a Norwegian fjord and left the mightiest ship in the German navy crippled at her moorings.

Remember it, then, not as a failure but as an honest, hard-working aircraft asked to do a great deal with too little power — and which, on its best day, did something that genuinely mattered.

There is a neat symmetry to the Barracuda’s place in history. It began by retiring the biplanes, the last of the fabric-and-wire generation that had carried the Fleet Air Arm into the war, and it ended as the last major British piston-engined carrier strike aircraft, retired in its turn as jets took over the decks. For a few short years in the middle it was the aircraft in the middle of that transition — modern enough to matter, old-fashioned enough to be overtaken — and it spent them working hard in every ocean the Royal Navy fought in. Not many aircraft that people remember as failures can say as much.

So the next time the Barracuda comes up as the punchline to a joke about ugly aeroplanes, it is worth remembering the fjord at Kaafjord on the morning of 3 April 1944, and the young naval airmen who took that awkward, underpowered, unloved machine down through the flak and left the pride of the German surface fleet burning at her moorings. History could afford to be a little kinder to the Fairey Barracuda.