Interesting question. You are correct in surmising that first run military aircraft are probably most likely to have undesirable characteristics. It’s also true of old aircraft. All aircraft are compromises though, and any individual aircraft will have various things it’s not good at, normally things it’s not designed for.
Apart from a couple of vintage training aircraft, I don’t have any experience with military planes. There are a few that stand out as having particularly annoying traits. The thing is they also have some great traits and also happen to be a lot of fun.
In my experience the least pilot friendly aircraft I’ve flown has been the Tiger Moth. The version I flew had no brakes, a tail skid instead of a tail wheel, and no electrics. Starting it by yourself involved setting chocks by the wheels, turning the fuel on, setting the throttle open, opening the cowling and pumping a little button to prime the carb. Then you’d pull the prop through several revolutions by hand to get some fuel into the cylinders. Then you’d set the throttle to idle, turn the magneto switches on and start swinging the prop again to start it.
Sometimes the “impulse” magneto which provides the spark for starting would be jammed and you wouldn’t hear any “click” when trying to start it. If this happened you’d open the cowling again, locate the magneto and give it a good solid WACK with a heavy metal object. Hopefully that would free up the mag and you’d be able to get it started.
Once started you could remove the chocks, hop in the open cockpit, and get strapped in. Visibility out the front is very poor and you’d leave the cockpit side door open and lean your head out into the wind to try and see ahead.
Taxying was always interesting. With no brakes and just a skid at the tail the steering on the ground was not very positive. On grass and with a bit of a headwind you could normally get it pointed in the right direction with out too many problems, but if you found yourself on tarmac, with a tailwind, and even worse, on a downhill slope, you could put full rudder in to try and turn but the aeroplane would just keep going straight ahead. You always had to allow enough room in front to be able to roll to a stop at idle power. Sometimes the only way to get turned if you wanted to go around some obstacle was to add power to try and get some slipstream over the rudder. But sometimes that just left you going faster toward whatever you’re trying to avoid! Or you might find you can get it turned to the right but you want to go left so you have to go the long way around. Young children watching would wonder allowed if the pilot knew what he was doing.
You’d do a quick power check on the take-off roll and you had to remember the engine goes the opposite way from American aeroplanes so you needed to be ready to apply LEFT rudder rather than RIGHT to keep it straight.
Once airborne, if there’s any turbulence it just wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience. The ailerons are very ineffective for reasons I won’t go into, so you’d stir the stick around trying to keep it flying roughly straight and level and you’d wonder if the stick was actually connected to anything. There is no rudder trim so you’d constantly be holding some rudder in. The cockpit’s open so if it’s a cold day then you’d get a very cold face, and if it’s raining you’d get wet.
Sounds horrible doesn’t it?
But on a nice day it was just great fun. All that crap about feeling the wind in your hair, it’s all true. There’s nothing quite like flying along in an open cockpit biplane on a nice day, cruising past hikers in the mountains and giving them a wave and a waggle of the wings. Landing in a paddock by a river and having a break.
On a bad day it was an absolute pain in the arse, but on a good day it was all worth it. Here’s me having a good day.
