Brewster Buffalo - what is the verdict?

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tomo pauk

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Apr 3, 2008
A member at another forum posted this:

Oh yes!
Let me spend 30 seconds on google
Here this should do it
First one I found
So in short -
Poor QC at factory (the factory was garbage and there was corruption from top management to shop floor)
Landing stuts failed particularly in use by Fighter 3 sqn on Sara
Cyclone engines provided in the 170 Model 339E where of a substandard version often 2nd hand taken from DC3s - these had 1100 HP compared to the 1200 HP provided for the USN and Finns
The Cyclones power was porcine and got worse the higher it got, the engines over heated and leaked.
Commonwealth Squadrons lost many aircraft before Dec 7th due to training accidents - I believe 30 in total - granted a lot might have been down to the mostly green pilots and squadrons lacking in tools etc but much was also down to component failures and the aircraft being utter garbage.
The bloody thing was a Pork Barrel - Brewster did not expect to be found out before it was opened on the other side of the world!
The British took one look at it and went nope...nope nope nope....and fobbed it off to the ends of the earth where the only enemy it might face was the Japanese and they were thought to be rubbish, the Americans fobbed it off to the Marines after a single squadron on Saratoga (VF3) operated them in 1940-41 and found them wanting!
While initially it was made heavier by the addition of equipment found on other British fighters like armour seat rests, etc - subsequent efforts were made to reduce weight such as replacing the 50 cals with 303 Browning's and less ammo and fuel
But you cannot polish a turd!

Any takers?
 
Calling buffnut453 !
 
I wondered if anything could be done to improve the Buffalo. Had it been ordered to the same requirements as the F4F (ie folding wings giving a longer wingspan...) or if it had been built by anyone else. It wouldn't be the Buffalo we've all come to know and adore.
 
tomo pauk said:
A member at another forum posted this:



The British took one look at it and went nope...nope nope nope....and fobbed it off to the ends of the earth where the only enemy it might face was the Japanese and they were thought to be rubbish,
Click to expand...
A direct purchase by Britain in early 1940 as an off the shelf purchase to provide a modern fighter for areas not then directly involved in the war (i.e. the Far East) and for which better aircraft could not be supplied by either British or other US companies.

The choice was between the Seversky P-35 & the Brewster 339E. Both companies had limited production facilities at the time. The former was the preferred option both on price & because of rumours about the management at Brewster, considered exaggerated by the British Air Attache in Washington. But Seversky was in negotiations with Sweden for more P-35 which would have absorbed its production facilities. So Britain, needing a quick delivery, opted for the Brewster Buffalo which was also being purchased by the Dutch at the time for the NEI, so offering some hopes of commonality with a neighbour in the event of war.
 
Hi,
One of the things that has struck me aout the Buffalo is trying to understand it in better in context with other similar planes and such.

For instance some people make a point about issues with the engines used in the Buffalo, but some stuff that I have read indicates that there actually may have been issues with the Wright Cyclone in other aircraft early in the war (if I am recalling correctly).

Similarly I have also seen disparaging comments about the bulges on the wings that were added to fit the wing mounted guns, but in reality they really don't look bad compared to other aircraft, and as I understand it the Buffalo was actually one of the first aircraft (at least in the US) to do extensive full scale wind tunnel testing which led to alot of improvements in its design.

Additionally, from stuff that I have read about the Far East I am not really certain that there wouldn't have been similar issues with most any other aircraft at the time.

And finally, most of the US combat experience with the F2A seems to have been based on the events from the USMC at the Battle of Midway, which appears to have been only a single event and from what I understand some of the pilots were very inexperienced and hadn't yet had the chance to incorporate lessons learned from the Navy from the Battle of Coral Sea, etc. Additionally, I seem to also recall reading that the F4F-3 and F4F-3A's also used at Midway did not fare all that well either with one pilot in his after action report actually saying that he felt that neither plane was suitable for use, or something like that.

As such, seeing that the Finns seems to have had good experience with the type, I kind of wonder whether maybe had the US, UK and its Allies had a chance to properly work up the type, its aircrew, maintenance and ground crews if the plane may not have faired better.

In the end though, since it was a plane only bought in very limited numbers (509 worldwide, I think) and Brewster wasn't really set up for mass production at the time, I suspected that the plane was likely to quickly fade from service regardless of any other issues.

Pat
 
It's worth remembering that the Finns fought the Russians, who allowed the Luftwaffe massive victory counts early in the war, right when the Finns were fighting them, too. So, while the Finns were undoubtedly good pilots, perhaps their superman status should be tempered a bit with consideration for their opponents' skill level and organizational suitability to fighting a war where people must think on their own.
 
The Finns didn't even get the 1100hp engines.
The Aircraft the Finns got weighed about 5000-5300lbs depending on fuel load and guns/ammo.
They also had a 950hp (TO) engine with no reduction gear.

The Dutch and British planes went around 6100lbs (and this is with 110 US gallons of fuel) although the ammo load looks a bit much.
The US F2A-3 was about 6500lbs also with 110 US gal of fuel.
 
Hi,
Thanks for the feedback. I wasn't trying to imply tht the Finnish Buffalos were "super planes" or anything like that. I just mentioned them because the B239s in Finnish service seemed to perfrom at least as well as the Fokker D XXIs, Curtiss Hawks and other similar aircraft that they also flew, and it is even said (I believe) that they performed better than the early Hurricanes that the Finns and Russians also operated.

As such, my thought that had the UK and its Commonwealth Allies along with the DEI forces had a better chance to work up the personnel and work through some of the issues that began becoming apparant once stationed in the Far East (such as issues with gun jams and humidity causing electrical issues as well as engine cooling issues) then maybe they could have performed better.

However, from stuff that I have read in books like "Bloody Shambles", "Buffaloes Over Singapore" and "Hurricanes over Singapore" it appears that due to alot of the issues that the US, UK, Commonwealth and DEI forces faced in the early stages of the war in the Far East, even if the latest P-40, Hurricanes and Spitfires were available for use, it isn't really clear that it would have made much of a difference, as adequate command and control, experienced crew, repair facilities and ground base defence and manning just wasn't there.

In the end then, in some ways the Buffalo remainds me a bit of the P-36 (and its export versions) in that it was kind of a mid to late 1930s radial engined monoplane fighter design developed primarily before the war broke out, and that while some shanges may have been made to the basic designs, the fact that the P-36 was soon out of production and the Buffalo never extended much beyond limited production, that the designs were soon overcome by events and overshadowed by other aircraft.

Additionally I do also think however, that some of the negative things long attributed to the Buffalo, while likely based in true facts, may be sometimes magnified out of proportion over time. A good example of this may be the comments about the plane being "unstable" which appears to me to be due to note meeting longitudinal stability guides. In general as I understand it, this can happen to many planes in varying operational load outs, and while undesirable and something that you would likely not want to have in normal operating conditions, it doesn't mean that the plane was basically "on the verge of falling from the sky" as some stuff on the internet and even some books almost seem to imply.

Similarly I have seen some sites and/or books talk about its "miniscule" wing size, eventhough its wing size was very much in line with what would be expected fro a plane of its size (I believe). And I have even noted that some of these sites and books have gone as far as to claim that the wing area was only measured as big as it was "by counting the area of the fuselage" where the wings would have been, eventhough (as I understand it) this is standard practice for all aircraft.

Anyway, ust some additional thoughts

Pat
 
There's nothing wrong with the Buffalo, you just need more of them. When Malaya had four active fighter squadrons in Dec 1941 the UK had over eighty. Assuming they could be had, give RAF Malayan Command twenty-five Buffalo squadrons as part of a wider air defence plan (protected airfields, spares/logistics support, communications, radar) and they'll do just fine against the Oscars, Nates, Nells and Bettys.
 
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The Brewster Buffalo was far from a world beater but the main issues were Brewster's dismal quality control and cheap engines. In Malaya, Burma and the Dutch East Indies their common opponents were JAAF Ki27s with Ki43s becoming more common with time. Properly made they were up to the task and the good Cyclones in Mohawks were still the principal Indian air defence for a time into 1943 and had opposed the Italian Air Force in East Africa with the SAAF in 1941. The Indian Mohawks were only withdrawn in 1944. This supports a view that the Brewster obtained Cyclones were sub standard.

Not a good aeroplane but an adequate design for its day. Let down by a criminally careless maker. Nevertheless it had a positive record against the JAAF in their largest land campaign away from China.

The Finns liked it so much that they kept the shape and went to the trouble of making it in wood for themselves. The pilots were highly skilled heroes but equal credit has to go to their technical staff who added in assorted parts like German reflector sights, corrected oil pooling etc, kept on top of Brewster's sloppy metalwork and they had the lightest service version which had been praised for it's flying qualities by the USN.

Properly made, without allowing weight creep and with a good Cyclone the Brewster Buffalo would be a perfectly adequate 1939-42 fighter. Not the best, but adequate. Badly made and overweight with weak engines then noticeably less so. In its operations it suffered from a lack of efficient air control direction.
 
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Just about everybody used "gross" wing area which includes the fuselage area.
I looked a few numbers in AHT.
There is a difference between a P-39 and a Buffalo which are rather extreme examples of fuselage shape for very close to the same wing area.
The P-39s fuselage used up 7.8 % of the wing area while Buffalo used up 17.3%.

I did a few other aircraft a while back and most US Aircraft fell between the the two.
The P-47 is about 15.4% and the P-40 is 8.5%
Not all data charts/tables show the fuselage areas or the net wing areas.
P-47s wing was close to constant cord and the fuselage width was was pretty much constant from the rear of the cockpit forward.

Since everybody was measuring/calculating the same way it doesn't seem to make much difference unless we are discussing the outliers.
The Buffalo was on the small side for a plane of it's size and type. They wanted a low wing loading for carrier operations and you cannot just leave off the carrier "stuff" and get land plane performance because some the "stuff" was built in, Like the wing area and the ability to smack into carrier decks (which the Buffalo wasn't very good at) .
 
ssnider said:
Does anyone have actual numbers on landing gear failures and the failure rate for other aircraft?
Click to expand...
Well. On Oct 14th VF-2 is on board the Lexington with all new (or only a few months old) F2A-3 having swapped their F2A-2s in September. July had seen the 1st F2A-3 produced but most of them were produced in Aug and Sept.
VF-2 had 17 F2A-3s in service with 5 spares.
By Dec 3rd they had ceased flying any operations with the F2A-3s unless enemy contact was imminent.
They had lost 3 planes in operational accidents. 3 had landing gear strut failures on normal landings. Progressive landing gear failures had started in 12 out of 17 aircraft.
No information on the number of landings/flights to result in that damage.

The damage was often progressive, The landing gear struts would bend rearwards and not allow the landing gear to close/retract properly and as quick fix the mechanics would file the parts where they hit to get clearance. Which slightly weakened the strut/s which lead to further bending.
 
Shortround6 said:
...
The Buffalo was on the small side for a plane of it's size and type. ...
Click to expand...
Hi,
Here's a graph that I put together along time ago (that I have recently tried to clean up a little) that shows wing loading vs gross weight for a number of WWII type fighters. The main data on the USN and USAAF planes comes from Francis Dean's "America's 100,000" but I later added in data for some RN. RAF, and other European fighter aircraft for comparison.


As you can see the Yellow Squares represent the F2A family of aircraft and also form the left hand side of the USN data that I have also drawn a trend line though. The two Yellow Squares that are almost ontop of each other just below 30 lb/sq ft loading and just over 6,000 lb gross weight represent the B-339D & B-339E models (if I am recalling correctly). As you can see the just under 30 lb/sq ft wing loading for the B-339s appears pretty much in line with reddish colored diamond at about 7,000lb representing the Seafire L MkII, and just a hair below the purpleish diamond representing the Hurricane MkIIC, at about 7,700lb. And additionally they are not too different from the two Blue Squares at about 7,400-7,500lb representing a couple models of the F4F, and actually below the values for the F4F-4 and FM-1 near about 8,000 lb.

And finally the wing loading of just under 30 lb/sq ft for the B-339D & B-339E appears a fair bit lower than the 32.77lb/sq ft listed for the dark orange circle representing the proposed carrier version of the Me-109, labeled here as the Me-109T.

As such, it really does not appear to me that the B-339 varaints of the Buffalo were really in any way over loaded in comparison to other intended carrier based aircraft, or especially in comparison to the land based aircracft shown.

Regards

Pat
 
Someone wanted me to contribute to this thread...so here are some comments.

The comment about 30 Commonwealth Buffalos being lost before the outbreak of hostilities is absolute nonsense. According to the Aircraft Record Cards at the RAF Historical Branch, some 18 Buffalos were written off in the period 1 April 1941 thru 8 December 1941. Of these:
  • 7 were entirely due to pilot error (crashing into obstacles, undershooting the landing, one mid-air collision etc).
  • Another 4 were engine failures.
  • A further 3 were unspecified forced/crash landings, although engine failure likely played a part in them (2 of these included an element of pilot error).
  • 3 were due to undercarriage collapse/failure.
  • 1 loss was due to a fire in the air, the pilot baling out of the aircraft.
It's fair to suggest that the biggest single causal factor was the inexperience of the pilots. Many had never flown an aircraft that had a retractable undercarriage aircraft or flaps, and so an "OTU" was established on Wirraways before they converted to the Buffalo. However, pilot inexperience clearly was a major factor. Engine failure was the next biggest factor, involving at least 6 and perhaps 8 accidents. Undercarriage failure resulted in only 3 airframes being written off. Given the inexperience of the crews, loss of 18 airframes in an 8-month period across 5 operational squadrons does not seem excessive.

The engine problems with the Buffalo are well known, with pilots in Malaya/Singapore reporting the performance of some engines as "pathetic." However, not all the blame should be apportioned to Brewster. Wright simply didn't have the production capacity to meet the demand, hence the use of refurbished engines. We all think of America as the arsenal of democracy. However, it was far from being that in late 1940 when the RAF's Buffalos were under construction. A fair amount of production capacity in the US defence industry came directly from orders in the UK that were paid for with cash (this predates Lend Lease by a considerable margin). It was Wright's responsibility to ensure their engines were fit for purpose. It was Brewster's responsibility to check the engines as installed were meeting specifications. It was the British Purchasing Commission's responsibility to ensure aircraft leaving the factory were acceptable. It seems there were failures across the board.

The RAF never received any Buffalo that had a 1200hp engine. All RAF Buffalos were supposed to have 1100hp engines but, as noted above, many engines failed to deliver even close to the specified power levels. The Dutch did get some 1200hp machines and their performance was notably better than the 1100hp airframes. The Finns received modified F2A-1s that had 950hp engines...so, actually, the lowest power of any Buffalo variant, and yet they did rather well with them.
 
Hi,
With regards to the refurbished engines, in addition to the very informative post by Buffnut above, I have been trying to look into the mechanics behind how the engines were procured. I know that before the British Procurement Commission (BPC) was set up, as well as presummably the Netherlands Purchasing Commission (NPC), that things like the engines and armament were considered "war material" or something similar. As such, it is my understanding that when the remainder of the USN's F2A-1 procurement was declared"surplus" so that the remaining ariframes in that order could be sold off to Finland as modified B-239 aircraft thay were sold without engines or armament, with Finland buying commercial Curtiss Wright engines for them.

These issues may have changed by the time that the BPC and NPC were stood up to facilitate the ability of those countries to rearm, however, in looking through the internet I have come across the following comment from this site about the NEI order about a member of the NPC named Major te Roller;

"By this and other ingenious machinations the NPC managed to scrape together a total of 72 Buffalo airframes. The next headache were the engines. Major te Roller had to use his considerable skills in his negotiations with manufacturers and second hand suppliers. It would go too far to describe the incredible wheeling and dealing needed to acquire the powerplants (most of them less powerful than required) but finally it was all done and deliveries of the fighters began at Roosevelt Field, Long Island, in March 1941."

It is not fully clear to me yet whether the engines for the RAF and RAAF fighter were similarly aquired through the BPC or if they were purchased directly by Brewster, but as Buffnut noted in his post Curtiss Wright, Brewster and the BPC all bore some degree of responsibility in ensuring that the engines were up to spec.

All this then also brings up a point to me as to in what respect the comments of the engines not performing to spec were made. With respect to this I have come across a quote on Dan Ford's website notes that
"Inspections were also not being done and the aircraft were rapidly becoming unreliable. The ex civil Airline engines on the Buffalos were quite unsuited to the treatment they were getting in combat and on the ground, and many developed serious loss of [illegible, but probably intending "loss of oil" or "loss of power"]."

As such, I have been wondering whether some of the comments about the engines not being up to spec were for the planes as delivered and assembled or if they may have referred to the planes after a few weeks of combat operations with the planes not having recieved all the maintennace and ground work needed to keep them fully up to spec due to severe personnel and parts shortages. As I understand it I believe that there was only 1 Maintenance Unit in theatre that was supposed to maintain all the engines of all RAF and RAAF aircraft in the Singapore and Malaya theatre.

Regards

Pat
 
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