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Aviation History
1940
1940 - 0019.PDF
JANUARY 4, 1940. AN INTERNATIONAL LOSS Death of Anthony Fokker : A Personal Tribute By C. M. POULSEN IT is no exaggeration to say that with the death in NewYork on December 23, 1939, of Anthony Fokker thewhole world loses one of its most picturesque pioneers of aircraft design. There seems to have been something almost prophetic in Fokker's parents' choice of Christian names for their son. Anthony Herman Gerard sound British, German and French respectively, and Tony Fokker was destined to be an international figure in aviation. Born in Java some 49 years ago, he began his aeronautical career in his native Holland at a very young age. As was to be expected, he had many setbacks, and failing to get financial support in Holland he made his way to Germany where, towards the end of 1911, he made his first successful flight from Johannisthal aerodrome, near Berlin.. During 1912 Fokker made many flights on this machine, on one occasion starting from Johannisthal and alighting on the frozen Muggelsee. That machine was a rather weird contraption, and was, like so many early aeroplanes, designed to have a great measure of automatic or inherent stability. The monoplane wings were set at a very pro- nounced dihedral angle, and were also swept back, but there was no warping of them for lateral control (ailerons were not common in those days). It was, in fact, a two- control aeroplane (elevator and rudder). The efficiency can- not have been very great, for the wing surfaces did not join the sides of the fuselage, a wide gap being left in order to give the pilot a view of the ground, and the effective aspect ratio must have been very low. Fokker persevered, and some time before the outbreak of the war, 1914-18, he offered his designs and his services to the British Government. They were not accepted, a fact for which the Government was later blamed, somewhat un- reasonably, when Tony had become a successful designer in Germany, and the so-called "Fokker Scourge" was at its height. In all truthfulness it cannot be said that at the time he wanted to come to England to work there was any reason to expect exceptional things from him. During the 1914-18 war Fokker became well estab- lished in Germany. AtSchwerin he designed and built (perhaps inspired would be a better word than designed, for Fokker was never a very highly technical man) several types which did good work in the German air force. The first machine to make the Fokker name famous was a little monoplane based on the French Morane, but having a welded steel tube fuselage, a form of construction which Fokker may be said to have cham- pioned almost from the very beginning, and with which he achieved great success. That machine was very soon fitted with a rather crude but serviceable type of interrupter gear, so that the machine gun could be placed in the fuselage without fear of smash- ing the airscrew blades with the bullets. The French pilot Garros, a Morane-Saulnier pilot and a great war "ace," had steel plates fixed to the blades of the wooden airscrew so that, if a bullet should happen to strike them, it would be deflected. It may have been that which gave Fokker his idea for the interrupter gear. Other Fokker types became popular during the war, notably the D-type biplane two-seater .and the triplane single-seater. The latter had a reputation for shedding its top plane if put into a very steep dive. That may or may not have been the case, but in any event it was a very useful machine mainly because it had a very good angle of climb, due to the low wing loading. If is scarcely surprising that Fokker was not very popular with many Germans during the war. He was, after all, a foreigner, and doubtless large sections of the German aircraft world felt that orders should go to the old- established German firms. Of intrigues against him there were many. To help the German Government he had to take out. German naturalisation papers, and after the war there were prolonged l^gal proceedings to determine whether, in fact, Tony had ever become a German citizen. He married the daughter of a German general, but the marriage was dissolved after a few years. After the war he decided to return to Holland, and his famous book, '' The Flying Dutchman," records how, by lavish bribery of railway officials, he was able to '' smuggle '' a whole trainload of parts and tool equipment into Holland. The first inter- national aero show after the war was held in 1919, known as the ELTA. When the ex- hibition was over Fokker bought the buildings, and there, on Papaverweg, estab- lished his Amsterdam works. One of the buildings is, we believe, still in use, although it was built of wood and only intended for a short life. While still keeping his Am- sterdam works going, Fokker himself went to America, where he contacted General Motors and started works. Several machines were produced, in- cluding what must have been one of the first, if not the very first, four-engined monoplane. He was unliJcky in that he and a financial slump hit the United States almost at the same time. The. slump won, Tony Fokker. ancj Fokker severed his con- nection with the American firm. In America he had, in order to stand any chance of getting orders, to apply for American naturalisation, and once upon a time there was considerable confusion con- cerning his real nationality. Of post-war aeroplanes Fokker produced many. That which achieved greatest fame was, perhaps, the F.VII-3m, a high-wing monoplane with one engine in the nose and two on the wings. It was one of this type, the Southern Cross, which Kingsford Smith used on several of his famous long-distance flights. It combined the features which Fokker had championed from the first, namely, a welded steel tube fuselage and wooden wings. Manufacturing costs, where small quantities were concerned, were very low, and changes in design could be readily incorporated, " Flight " photograph.
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