Breda Ba. 88 “Lince” or “Lynx”, an Italian WW2 heavy ground-attack fighter
According to a user on Quora, the worst aircraft is the Italian Breda Ba. 88 “Lince” or “Lynx”.
The Lince was theoretically a remarkably good plane when it was first created in Fall 1936. Its sleek exterior and two Plaggio P11 radial engines, the typical Italian bomber engine, allowed it to reach an amazing speed of nearly 520 km/h, which at the time even exceeded the airspeed record.
Its decent armament of three or four 12.7 mm machine guns and three 250 kg bombs allowed it to perform its intended function as a heavy-fighter bomber. It was oddly one of the few planes at the time to have retractable landing gear and self-sealing fuel tanks. The Lince might have truly been a capable heavy ground-attack fighter, similar to the well-known Russian IL-2 Shturmovik if things had worked out differently.
However, the Lince’s performance suffered as a result of production inefficiency (which was frequent among Italians in World War II) and the addition of bulky military equipment. It ultimately turned out to be quite overweight and aerially unstable, which are both very undesirable characteristics for an aircraft that wants to stay in the air and not end up as a burning wreck on the ground.
In 1940, two air groups on Sardinia armed with the Lince used them to target enemy airfields for the first time in combat. Pilots initially gave the Lince disproportionately unfavorable feedback, describing it as being incredibly sluggish, ponderous, and underpowered. They did, however, manage to have a little success because there was no hostile fighter cover. As a result, the Italians chose to send the majority of their active aircraft to North Africa, where things swiftly turned bad.
The Italians made the choice to employ a few Linces for ground assaults against the British in their initial offensive in North Africa. One of the three aircraft utilized in the mission was unable to even take off from the airfield, and the other was unable to turn once in the air, forcing it to fly straight ahead in order to land at another Italian air base. Sand filters were installed to the Lince’s engines to cope with the harsh African climate, which increased the aircraft’s weight and further decreased its already pitiful performance. And from that point forward, everything deteriorated.
The Ba 88 Lince’s already weak engines immediately overheated as a result of the added strain from the filters, and they were only able to maintain a limited top speed of 250 kmph. And even then, it couldn’t have taken off. In other units, things got so bad that no planes could even take off! Additionally, the situation was equally awful on the rare occasions that a formation of Linces was able to maintain flight. The majority of the attacks in which the Linces participated were abandoned, in addition to the apparent issue of serving as target practice for enemy pilots. Simply because the planes were unable to maintain their height or even maintain a formation flight. Only a few months after its debut, the Lince’s operational performance was so dismal that, by the end of 1940, the Italians stripped their entire Ba 88 fleet of military equipment, leaving them to rust on different airfields as Allied aircraft decoy targets. This was a humiliating end for this new aircraft.
Despite the Ba88’s appalling performance, some special moron at Regia Aeronautica decided it would be a good idea to keep making the aircraft with the insane notion that it may perform better. Fortunately, the second series of Linces were all quickly scrapped afterward, with none seeing any battle, saving whatever dignity the Regia Aeronautica still had. After the Italian Armistice, a few original Ba 88s were modified and made it to 1943, where they were delivered to be tested by the Luftwaffe.
What may have been a promising and powerful ground-attack-heavy fighter ended up being such a colossal flop that its only useful use was as a decoy target.