Post by volkerboehme on Aug 10, 2008 9:15:41 GMT -5
Some interesting comments from FSAviator:
This is an attempt to put the events discussed in this thread into their wider historical context, provide an appropriate timeline, and at the same time detail US armed forces procurement of the Fokker Trimotor to resolve earlier possible confusion.
It is possible that some of the people Fokker did business with are still alive. When most of the relevant books were written some of them certainly were and some of them had smart lawyers. That inhibited what authors were able to publish. You have to read between the lines, whether reading the original books, or later plagiarism of them.
Fokker was a skilled pilot, a great showman and a highly skilled entrepreneur. Stealing other people's designs, stealing train loads of aircraft, setting up illegal flying schools for German military aircrew, gun running and sanctions busting to arm the newly formed Soviet Union, to ensure its long run survival, were profitable enough in the short run, but the Soviet Union was soon short of hard cash and the United States soon began to offer richer pickings. Until the 1930s the US aviation industry was little more than the latest branch of organised crime.
Fokker's key talents were deal making, getting third parties to promote his products at their expense, but above all hiring super smart people and then assuming the patent rights over their inventions. Consequently Fokker held the world patents to welded tubular metal airframe construction and the most efficient low speed wooden aerofoil, but he had an extensive track record of arming Britain, France and America's enemies. It the aftermath of his unstinting support for Germany and the Soviet Union during WW1 it was difficult for him to penetrate the markets of the French and British Empires.
He was therefore delighted when first Billy Mitchell, then the whole U.S. Army Air Service began to promote Fokker products during the 1920s. The U.S. Army procured a Fokker F-IV airliner and used it to set records for endurance, distance, and speed in a series of publicity stunts culminating in the famous first non stop transcontinental flight from New York to San Diego in 1922.
These publicity stunts grabbed the attention of Henry Ford who decided to become one of Fokker's main sponsors, eventually attracting him to live in the United States and assume U.S. citizenship. Of course Ford wasn't a philanthropist. He fully intended to study and then find a way around Fokker's key patents.
The Dutch built Fokker F-VIIA/3m that Fokker flew in the 'Ford Reliability Tour' of 1925 was then purchased by Edsel Ford to perform the Josephine Ford Arctic Expedition. Commander Richard Byrd flew it over the North Pole. The U.S. Navy then purchased three almost identical aircraft which would soon support the USMC in battle against the original Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These aircraft had slightly wider than standard cabins to allow bulky loads of no greater weight than usual and were powered by three Wright J5 radials. Originally designated TA-1 they were later designated RA-1. Late in life they were re-engined with J6 engines becoming RA-3s in the process.
The USAAC also evaluated the 'Josephine Ford' and then purchased two F-VIIA/3ms with standard cabins and J5 engines which took the designation C-2. Nine more designated C-2A followed fitted with a bigger long range wing and the first was flown from Oakland to Honolulu as a publicity stunt. The USN then ordered three of these long range aircraft as RA-2s. In a further publicity stunt the USN then flew one of these from New York to France. When they were later fitted with J6 engines they also became RA-3s even though they had a different wing to the first three RA-3s. The USN then ordered a final RA-3. Later a single C-2A was re-engined with J6s to become the XC-7.
In 1920s America everyone wanted to get rich quick and for those who were not involved in organised crime stock market speculation was the preferred method. The publicity stunts financed by Ford and the US taxpayer involving his trimotors made Fokker a huge celebrity. More and more Americans wanted to be associated with Fokker. Americans increasingly promoted his products with their own money and also raised money to build more factories for a celebrity they hoped would deal them in and become the next hot stock hero. There was however much more to this activity than first meets the eye. Read carefully between the lines.
Fokker had already established the Atlantic Aircraft Company in the United States in 1923 to build Fokker patent tubular metal fuselages for all the existing wooden Airco D.H.4 'Flying Coffins' being flown by the USAAC. He rented a factory in Teterboro N.J. and separately rented the adjoining Hasbrouck Heights airfield. USAAC orders for new improved Fokker tubular metal patent D.H.4s to be built under licence from Airco in Britain soon followed.
As more and more U.S. tax dollars flowed in Fokker bought a larger second factory in Teterboro to build the Universal and Super Universal, designed by the Dutch Canadian Bob Noorduyn especially for the North American market. Underneath the marketing hype and the hoopla it was all about flight dynamics. At a time when no American corporation held a patent for either flaps or slats the thick Fokker patent wooden wing was the only answer to safe low speed flight during the approach with a viable military or commercial payload.
Henry Ford had made a terrible mistake. He had promoted Fokker too well. There was now no way he could compete with Fokker on a like for like basis. He needed a Unique Selling Proposition. Undaunted he bought the under capitalised Stout Aircraft Corporation which was using world war one Junkers techniques to make single engined all metal aeroplanes in the United States. Ford ordered Bill Stout to make a pirate copy of a trimotor designed by Farman, but to make it all in metal. It was an expensive failure.
The next step was obvious. Edsel Ford arranged for the 'Josephine Ford' to visit and stay overnight for a huge publicity junket at the Ford company field at Dearborn. Flown by Byrd it duly arrived and as soon as it was safely out of sight inside the Ford plant Stout's engineers began making detailed drawings, working through the night.
Of course Fokker soon found out and he pretty much approved. After all he had made his first million by doing the same to Morane and Saulnier. However he knew that Ford would soon have a commercially viable design with a unique selling proposition, without breaching either the Fokker welded tubular metal patents, or the Fokker wooden wing patent.
Fokker now realised that the wooden winged aeroplane had a limited production life in the United States. He now had an ever increasing need to dump his American interests on buyers gullible enough to buy only the North American rights to a technology that he knew Ford was about to replace with a more evolved and eventually mass produced solution.
Say hello to General Motors, the primary suppliers, and through their placemen also primary procurers, of all the USAAC 'Flying Coffins' that Fokker had been brought in by Billy Mitchell to 'fix' in the first place.
Timing was the key. Fokker had to persuade GM to buy his North American interests for cash, not via a stock swap. Under the unregulated economic policies of the Hoover administration stock prices were rocketing to ever crazier levels on Wall Street. Fokker had to make GM wait until the Atlantic stock price was truly ludicrous. It was to be the greatest sting he ever pulled off.
Stringing GM along for as long as possible, just a few weeks before the Wall Street Crash, Fokker sold them 40% of the Atlantic Aircraft Company for $6,500,000 in cash, but at the same time he also sold a further 20% (some say 40%) to WAE. Now under GM ownership the Atlantic Aircraft Company suddenly became the General Aviation Corporation. Whether immediately or more likely very soon after WAE wound up owning 40% with Fokker owning only 20%, or maybe less.
Before the Wall Street Crash Fokker was one of many super rich Americans, but only on paper. After the Wall Street Crash he was suddenly one of the planet's very few remaining super rich industrialists, and in hard cash, at a time when cash was king.
Fokker's patents, plus of course all the rights to sell anything 'Fokker' outside North America, and his Dutch factories had never belonged to its subsidiary Atlantic Aircraft even though the latter was valued more highly on the New York Stock Exchange than the parent company on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
Factories outside North America were producing Fokkers equal to around a quarter of all the airliners in use outside North America. Over fifty airlines, in over twenty countries, were flying Fokker airliners and more to the point most Fokker aircraft produced in Holland for domestic consumption and export were combat aircraft not airliners.
After the Wall Street Crash GM continued to make wooden wing Fokkers, including the new F-X and of course airlines like WAE (soon merged into TWA) who now owned 40% of GAC were enthusiastic purchasers, but the new even larger factory at Glen Dale in West Virginia was doomed to a short life producing these aircraft. After the Wall Street crash GM and WAE realised they had been mugged and relations with Fokker were very hostile.
The USN tested the F-X and rejected it, but the USAAC bought a single C-5 which was an F-XA with smaller J6 engines in place of the more usual and much more powerful Wasps. It was horribly underpowered and so the final USAAC Fokker Trimotor order was for six standard F-XAs designated C-7.
Two years after Fokker sold control of his American holdings to GM and WAE, one of the many fatal airline crashes that happened every year in the U.S. under the Hoover administration, killed a famous football coach, and for that reason only, attracted a great deal of newspaper publicity. It happened to involve a TWA GM Trimotor, but no one really cared about that. All sorts of airliners crashed all the time.
Ford's all metal Fokker trimotor copies were now selling slowly, but were having difficulty capturing market share because, as Ford had always feared, they were too expensive when produced in low volumes. The Ford desperately needed mass production to succeed. Now suddenly the rush of publicity that attended the death of the famous football coach provided the perfect opportunity to knock the cheaper GM wooden winged Trimotors out of the market for good and begin mass production of Fords.
Herbert Hoover Jnr was a senior manager within TWA. The TWA crash had been caused by structural failure in severe turbulence in a thunderstorm and / or wind shear, but was officially blamed on pilot error. This official conclusion did not suit Ford at all. The rumour that wooden wings were inherently weaker and were prone to rot began to circulate, and was soon everywhere. If it died down it got stoked up again until TWA could not stand the heat. They lined up their nearly new Fokker F-Xs and set fire to them in a public display of remorse.
All Fokkers over 15 months old owned by U.S. based airlines were grounded and inspected for signs of wood rot, or any other structural weakness, but of course there was none. Within a fortnight all those not owned by TWA were back in service, but the calculated rumours had done their work. GAC was doomed and Ford sales surged.
GM saw this as the perfect opportunity to get rid of Fokker for good, also hoping to use him as some kind of scapegoat, leaving GM unscathed as a brand. Despite the fact that Fokker was technical director of GAC and still owned perhaps 20% of the stock they managed to get a restraining order against him which prevented him from entering any GAC premises or participating in board meetings, but to get rid of him for good the parent company GM had to pay his salary of $50,000 per annum for a further five years in severance even though GAC was clearly going under much sooner than that. Fokker cried all the way to his bank, returned to Holland triumphant, but retained U.S. citizenship because it continued to offer superior tax avoidance possibilities.
The huge adverse publicity surrounding the death of the famous football coach coupled with much wider racketeering in the U.S. aviation industry finally caused even the Hoover administration to move to endorse rather than oppose safety regulation, beginning the sea change in federal aviation policy described in the Propliner Tutorial part 1.
Just as no one in the United States ever read a foreign newspaper, no one anywhere else ever read an American one. Some fifteen factories world wide continued to build wooden winged Fokkers under licence from Holland. The subsequent demise of GAC was of some consequence to Fokker who still owned up to 20%, but he could afford to laugh it off. The stock had been worth much less after the Wall Street Crash anyway. A few days before the TWA crash GM had purchased 30% of WAE stock giving them almost 15% of TWA and a further 12% of GAC, and therefore outright control of GAC, for just $90,000.
Bob Noorduyn went back to Canada to found his own company where he would design the perfect replacement for his all important Fokker Universal. The Norseman would be a worthy successor.
There is an important postscript.
Say hello to the British engineer Sir John Siddeley who in 1928 purchased Avro from Alliot Verdon Roe allowing Roe to go off to build flying boats with Saunders. On acquisition Avro still had too many factories employing too many carpenters and too few metal workers. The company needed an off the shelf interim product with a tubular metal fuselage, but with a wooden wing. With WW1 now a fading memory Siddeley obtained an exclusive licence to manufacture Fokker Trimotors for sale in the British Empire outside North America under his newly acquired Avro brand. This included the right to build the Fokker patent wooden wing for use on any Avro branded aircraft, trimotor or otherwise, provided a royalty was paid on each one.
Avro were blessed with a skilled designer called Roy Chadwick who eventually realised that the only thing wrong with the Fokker patent thick wooden wing was that it was simply in the wrong place. If it were instead under the fuselage it could be fitted with short travel main gear retracting into the existing Fokker patent tubular metal framework of the existing engine nacelles to create a modern low wing monoplane that would be cheap and easy for all the surplus carpenters to manufacture.
The surplus carpenters at Avro now produced a lot more of the same Fokker patent wooden wings they were already producing, except the fuselage attachment points were now on top. Refuelling, engine changes and maintenance became much simpler with the Fokker patent thick wooden wing set low. Of course the latest Avro aircraft was normally powered by (Armstrong) Siddeley engines.
Say hello to the Avro Anson. From first delivery to Imperial Airways in 1935 until 1946 the Fokker winged Anson easily outsold the grand total of every Fokker aircraft in history, never mind the ones with wooden wings. It sold roughly double the number of all Lockheed Electras and Beech 18s put together. The only propliner to be built in larger numbers than the Anson was the DC-3 and its many derivatives, but of course only if you include illegal Lisunov Li-2 production in the Soviet Union, otherwise the DC-3 ranks a poor second to the Anson.
Far from being obsolete in 1931 Fokker didn't even live to see most of 'his' patent wooden wings take flight. He died in 1939. Production of the Fokker patent wooden wing did not peak until the early 1940s.
The third most produced 'propliner' of all time was also wooden winged. The Airspeed Oxford was designed by Neville Shute Norway of 'No Highway' fame, in collaboration with others, long after 1931. The Oxford had flaps. It did not need the Fokker patent wing, but all wooden wings were cheap to produce and Airspeed only employed carpenters.
There was nothing unsafe within the Fokker patent thick wooden wing, or other wooden wings in general, whatever Americans had been persuaded to believe by the carefully orchestrated whispering campaign of 1931. Henry Ford wasn't guessing when he said 'history is bunk'.
Of course wooden wings built in the 1920s did ultimately have a problem. The organic glue used to bond the wood together had a limited life span before it began to degrade, but it was the lifespan of the glue, not the lifespan of the wood that was limiting. By the time the Anson and Oxford entered series production wholly synthetic glues had replaced glues made from the sticky bits of dead animals. Even so late production Ansons manufactured between 1946 and 1953 had evolved metal wings. Certification standards evolved as the decades passed and great aircraft were able to evolve to match an ever changing environment
Finally it occurs to me that if the second most produced 'propliner' in history had been American and had been designed by a famous American author, someone would probably have produced an MDL compatible with at least one version of MSFS by now, but that's life. <Sigh>.
Regards,
FSAviator
Further comments from FSAviator:
There were (at least) a couple of errors in my recent contribution. The Airco D.H.4s used by the USAAC, which Fokker was brought in to 'fix' were of course known as 'Flaming Coffins' due to their propensity to burst into flames for 'mysterious' reasons.
In the final paragraph my reference to the second most produced 'propliner' should have read third. I am a happy user of the Avro Anson MDL and panel by Garwood, Booker and Maurri. It is the Airspeed Oxford, of which over 8,500 served around the world, designed by Neville Shute Norway, which has never been produced for FS use.
On rereading my post I may not have answered the following question from FSresearcher as explicitly as I intended,
<<Anyways, Fokker was planning to build a huge factory in Los Angeles in 1929. Does anyone know if they did, in fact, build this factory? All the hype for the factory ends with the stock market crash.>>
In 1929 the airport in Los Angeles was Glendale Airport. The factory was at Glen Dale in West Virginia. Around the web and elsewhere you may find articles which confuse Glendale with Glen Dale. As far as I know there was no plan to build a factory in both places.
One further comment on Fokker before a quick comment on the radio range beta.
<<(Fokker) apparently stole an Austrian patent for his First World War machine gun interrupter gear while in Germany and usurped any number of design innovations from a Reinhold Platz, a Fokker engineer>>
Usurped may be a good way to put it, but of course if a company employs someone as a designer they can patent or copyright anything he designs. What Fokker did, and has been widely criticised for, was to claim he had personally invented many of the technologies that he lawfully patented. I have the impression that he held the patents personally and then licensed them to his companies, but that would have been so that it did not matter who won the war.
<<By the way, are you aware of the Radio Range project, available for download? >>
No I was not previously aware of that project. I have now downloaded it. It seems to do exactly what it is supposed to do though I am unclear whether change of MAGVAR has been correctly incorporated. I am pleased to see that the need for approach procedures has been catered for. There are some disadvantages relating to historical placement versus modern FS9 runway placement, but they are worth putting up with. Well done to all concerned.
The procedures in the beta call for QFG after departure but assume VMC. Without using the procedures within part 4 of the propliner tutorial users are likely to collide with terrain in many locations. In the relevant era descent was apt to be at =>700 VSI and climb at only 500 VSI. The departure is potentially more dangerous than the arrival. Not all routes are along a coast.
It allows use of intersections using Audio + VAR when a VOR 1 receiver is used to emulate the Signal Corps Receiver.
Outside the geographical coverage of the new system, outside the historical coverage of the new system, the procedures in part 2 of the propliner tutorial remain the best way to simulate radio ranges within FS9.
I have a feeling that the fact that both the pre existing freeware Vega and the FS9 Vega include a Radio Range Receiver = Visual Audio Receiver = VAR = US Signal Corps Receiver that does not actually work as a Signal Corps Receiver in MSFS, only because there were no LF stations to receive and display, has left many users of MSFS with the idea that audio was the only means by which the Radio Range signals were received and the procedures flown.
The remaining issue which the project has not addressed is therefore the fact that MS coded the default Signal Corps Receiver in the Vega so that it could only work with MF signals and only as an obscured arc ADF. That was always the problem with the freeware precursor SCR = VAR gauge by Ernie Kennedy. Either the FS9 default SCR bitmap needs to be aliased from VOR code so that the real Signal Corps Receiver graphics will work with VHF signals for simulation of Radio Ranges anywhere, and in any era, or the new LF code ideally needs to be augmented and incorporated within the default Signal Corps Receiver gauge to drive it when tuned to LF so that it works prototypically as a Radio Range Visual Audio Receiver and not only as an obscured arc ADF.
It is possible, but it may be complicated. I do not understand xml well enough to know.
Regards,
FSAviator
And FSAviator comments:
<<The Wall Street Journal said that 1929 was on track to be Fokker America's best year ever. >>
Well it was certainly Anthony Fokker's best year ever.
Thanks for further clarifying the California connection. I had never heard of the F-32 being called a DP-32.
The launch customer was Universal Airlines. On its inaugural flight from Newark in 1929 Universal made sure the entire press corps turned up. It got airborne, had an engine failure, and promptly crashed. No one was ever going to fly in an F-32 owned by Universal after that. Crashes were two a penny, but it was a bad idea to invite the press to witness the event.
Universal blamed Fokker and refused to take any more. The row got ugly. As part of the process of turning Fokker into another General Motors brand GM simply bought Universal and the row went away. By now Anthony Fokker had sold 80% of the company and WAE owned 40%. Someone else had to order some F-32s, and quickly. Consequently it was WAE who got lumbered.
Over the next year Bob Noorduyn redesigned his horribly owerweight F-32 to have big Hornet engines in place of small Wasp engines. This enabled it to fly on only three engines at low altitude. My earlier post omitted a step. After the failure of the F-32 Noorduyn became chief designer at Bellanca before heading off to Canada.
So when WAE pretended to 'inaugurate' F-32 services in 1930, on a different coast, with lots of dancing girls on hand to amuse the press, it was to erase the memory of the real inaugural flight made by Universal in 1929.
With four big Hornet engines the F-32 was now only as unsafe as any other airliner of 1930, but it was horrendously expensive, costing 110K to buy and a matching amount to run. The F-X trimotor cost half that. WAE had to tolerate two F-32s for several months, but was soon almost insolvent trying to run them, which is how GM came to buy the controlling interest in WAE for only 90K, a few days before an F-X flown by their subsidiary TWA killed the Notre Dame football coach in March 1931.
Just a few months after the dancing girls had gone home, and America had been given the appropriately false impression, WAE did the sensible thing. They hired two men and a really big saw. Before they could hack the second one to bits some guy turned up and said he wanted the other one to adorn his gas station. He bought it for a few bucks. It was the only example to survive for more than a couple of years. The rest of the WAE order was also built to save face, but they never took delivery.
GM fitted one out as a 'GM corporate office' and tried to convince the press that they were actually going to fly it. Then they circulated rumours about millionaires wanting to buy them. Then they used their political influence to get the USAAC to test another as the YC-20 during 1931, but not surprisingly the USAAC rejected it. More men with big saws were hired and that was the end of the Fokker F-32.
A dinosaur is still a dinosaur even when it’s a brontosaurus.
Regards,
FSAviator
This is an attempt to put the events discussed in this thread into their wider historical context, provide an appropriate timeline, and at the same time detail US armed forces procurement of the Fokker Trimotor to resolve earlier possible confusion.
It is possible that some of the people Fokker did business with are still alive. When most of the relevant books were written some of them certainly were and some of them had smart lawyers. That inhibited what authors were able to publish. You have to read between the lines, whether reading the original books, or later plagiarism of them.
Fokker was a skilled pilot, a great showman and a highly skilled entrepreneur. Stealing other people's designs, stealing train loads of aircraft, setting up illegal flying schools for German military aircrew, gun running and sanctions busting to arm the newly formed Soviet Union, to ensure its long run survival, were profitable enough in the short run, but the Soviet Union was soon short of hard cash and the United States soon began to offer richer pickings. Until the 1930s the US aviation industry was little more than the latest branch of organised crime.
Fokker's key talents were deal making, getting third parties to promote his products at their expense, but above all hiring super smart people and then assuming the patent rights over their inventions. Consequently Fokker held the world patents to welded tubular metal airframe construction and the most efficient low speed wooden aerofoil, but he had an extensive track record of arming Britain, France and America's enemies. It the aftermath of his unstinting support for Germany and the Soviet Union during WW1 it was difficult for him to penetrate the markets of the French and British Empires.
He was therefore delighted when first Billy Mitchell, then the whole U.S. Army Air Service began to promote Fokker products during the 1920s. The U.S. Army procured a Fokker F-IV airliner and used it to set records for endurance, distance, and speed in a series of publicity stunts culminating in the famous first non stop transcontinental flight from New York to San Diego in 1922.
These publicity stunts grabbed the attention of Henry Ford who decided to become one of Fokker's main sponsors, eventually attracting him to live in the United States and assume U.S. citizenship. Of course Ford wasn't a philanthropist. He fully intended to study and then find a way around Fokker's key patents.
The Dutch built Fokker F-VIIA/3m that Fokker flew in the 'Ford Reliability Tour' of 1925 was then purchased by Edsel Ford to perform the Josephine Ford Arctic Expedition. Commander Richard Byrd flew it over the North Pole. The U.S. Navy then purchased three almost identical aircraft which would soon support the USMC in battle against the original Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These aircraft had slightly wider than standard cabins to allow bulky loads of no greater weight than usual and were powered by three Wright J5 radials. Originally designated TA-1 they were later designated RA-1. Late in life they were re-engined with J6 engines becoming RA-3s in the process.
The USAAC also evaluated the 'Josephine Ford' and then purchased two F-VIIA/3ms with standard cabins and J5 engines which took the designation C-2. Nine more designated C-2A followed fitted with a bigger long range wing and the first was flown from Oakland to Honolulu as a publicity stunt. The USN then ordered three of these long range aircraft as RA-2s. In a further publicity stunt the USN then flew one of these from New York to France. When they were later fitted with J6 engines they also became RA-3s even though they had a different wing to the first three RA-3s. The USN then ordered a final RA-3. Later a single C-2A was re-engined with J6s to become the XC-7.
In 1920s America everyone wanted to get rich quick and for those who were not involved in organised crime stock market speculation was the preferred method. The publicity stunts financed by Ford and the US taxpayer involving his trimotors made Fokker a huge celebrity. More and more Americans wanted to be associated with Fokker. Americans increasingly promoted his products with their own money and also raised money to build more factories for a celebrity they hoped would deal them in and become the next hot stock hero. There was however much more to this activity than first meets the eye. Read carefully between the lines.
Fokker had already established the Atlantic Aircraft Company in the United States in 1923 to build Fokker patent tubular metal fuselages for all the existing wooden Airco D.H.4 'Flying Coffins' being flown by the USAAC. He rented a factory in Teterboro N.J. and separately rented the adjoining Hasbrouck Heights airfield. USAAC orders for new improved Fokker tubular metal patent D.H.4s to be built under licence from Airco in Britain soon followed.
As more and more U.S. tax dollars flowed in Fokker bought a larger second factory in Teterboro to build the Universal and Super Universal, designed by the Dutch Canadian Bob Noorduyn especially for the North American market. Underneath the marketing hype and the hoopla it was all about flight dynamics. At a time when no American corporation held a patent for either flaps or slats the thick Fokker patent wooden wing was the only answer to safe low speed flight during the approach with a viable military or commercial payload.
Henry Ford had made a terrible mistake. He had promoted Fokker too well. There was now no way he could compete with Fokker on a like for like basis. He needed a Unique Selling Proposition. Undaunted he bought the under capitalised Stout Aircraft Corporation which was using world war one Junkers techniques to make single engined all metal aeroplanes in the United States. Ford ordered Bill Stout to make a pirate copy of a trimotor designed by Farman, but to make it all in metal. It was an expensive failure.
The next step was obvious. Edsel Ford arranged for the 'Josephine Ford' to visit and stay overnight for a huge publicity junket at the Ford company field at Dearborn. Flown by Byrd it duly arrived and as soon as it was safely out of sight inside the Ford plant Stout's engineers began making detailed drawings, working through the night.
Of course Fokker soon found out and he pretty much approved. After all he had made his first million by doing the same to Morane and Saulnier. However he knew that Ford would soon have a commercially viable design with a unique selling proposition, without breaching either the Fokker welded tubular metal patents, or the Fokker wooden wing patent.
Fokker now realised that the wooden winged aeroplane had a limited production life in the United States. He now had an ever increasing need to dump his American interests on buyers gullible enough to buy only the North American rights to a technology that he knew Ford was about to replace with a more evolved and eventually mass produced solution.
Say hello to General Motors, the primary suppliers, and through their placemen also primary procurers, of all the USAAC 'Flying Coffins' that Fokker had been brought in by Billy Mitchell to 'fix' in the first place.
Timing was the key. Fokker had to persuade GM to buy his North American interests for cash, not via a stock swap. Under the unregulated economic policies of the Hoover administration stock prices were rocketing to ever crazier levels on Wall Street. Fokker had to make GM wait until the Atlantic stock price was truly ludicrous. It was to be the greatest sting he ever pulled off.
Stringing GM along for as long as possible, just a few weeks before the Wall Street Crash, Fokker sold them 40% of the Atlantic Aircraft Company for $6,500,000 in cash, but at the same time he also sold a further 20% (some say 40%) to WAE. Now under GM ownership the Atlantic Aircraft Company suddenly became the General Aviation Corporation. Whether immediately or more likely very soon after WAE wound up owning 40% with Fokker owning only 20%, or maybe less.
Before the Wall Street Crash Fokker was one of many super rich Americans, but only on paper. After the Wall Street Crash he was suddenly one of the planet's very few remaining super rich industrialists, and in hard cash, at a time when cash was king.
Fokker's patents, plus of course all the rights to sell anything 'Fokker' outside North America, and his Dutch factories had never belonged to its subsidiary Atlantic Aircraft even though the latter was valued more highly on the New York Stock Exchange than the parent company on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
Factories outside North America were producing Fokkers equal to around a quarter of all the airliners in use outside North America. Over fifty airlines, in over twenty countries, were flying Fokker airliners and more to the point most Fokker aircraft produced in Holland for domestic consumption and export were combat aircraft not airliners.
After the Wall Street Crash GM continued to make wooden wing Fokkers, including the new F-X and of course airlines like WAE (soon merged into TWA) who now owned 40% of GAC were enthusiastic purchasers, but the new even larger factory at Glen Dale in West Virginia was doomed to a short life producing these aircraft. After the Wall Street crash GM and WAE realised they had been mugged and relations with Fokker were very hostile.
The USN tested the F-X and rejected it, but the USAAC bought a single C-5 which was an F-XA with smaller J6 engines in place of the more usual and much more powerful Wasps. It was horribly underpowered and so the final USAAC Fokker Trimotor order was for six standard F-XAs designated C-7.
Two years after Fokker sold control of his American holdings to GM and WAE, one of the many fatal airline crashes that happened every year in the U.S. under the Hoover administration, killed a famous football coach, and for that reason only, attracted a great deal of newspaper publicity. It happened to involve a TWA GM Trimotor, but no one really cared about that. All sorts of airliners crashed all the time.
Ford's all metal Fokker trimotor copies were now selling slowly, but were having difficulty capturing market share because, as Ford had always feared, they were too expensive when produced in low volumes. The Ford desperately needed mass production to succeed. Now suddenly the rush of publicity that attended the death of the famous football coach provided the perfect opportunity to knock the cheaper GM wooden winged Trimotors out of the market for good and begin mass production of Fords.
Herbert Hoover Jnr was a senior manager within TWA. The TWA crash had been caused by structural failure in severe turbulence in a thunderstorm and / or wind shear, but was officially blamed on pilot error. This official conclusion did not suit Ford at all. The rumour that wooden wings were inherently weaker and were prone to rot began to circulate, and was soon everywhere. If it died down it got stoked up again until TWA could not stand the heat. They lined up their nearly new Fokker F-Xs and set fire to them in a public display of remorse.
All Fokkers over 15 months old owned by U.S. based airlines were grounded and inspected for signs of wood rot, or any other structural weakness, but of course there was none. Within a fortnight all those not owned by TWA were back in service, but the calculated rumours had done their work. GAC was doomed and Ford sales surged.
GM saw this as the perfect opportunity to get rid of Fokker for good, also hoping to use him as some kind of scapegoat, leaving GM unscathed as a brand. Despite the fact that Fokker was technical director of GAC and still owned perhaps 20% of the stock they managed to get a restraining order against him which prevented him from entering any GAC premises or participating in board meetings, but to get rid of him for good the parent company GM had to pay his salary of $50,000 per annum for a further five years in severance even though GAC was clearly going under much sooner than that. Fokker cried all the way to his bank, returned to Holland triumphant, but retained U.S. citizenship because it continued to offer superior tax avoidance possibilities.
The huge adverse publicity surrounding the death of the famous football coach coupled with much wider racketeering in the U.S. aviation industry finally caused even the Hoover administration to move to endorse rather than oppose safety regulation, beginning the sea change in federal aviation policy described in the Propliner Tutorial part 1.
Just as no one in the United States ever read a foreign newspaper, no one anywhere else ever read an American one. Some fifteen factories world wide continued to build wooden winged Fokkers under licence from Holland. The subsequent demise of GAC was of some consequence to Fokker who still owned up to 20%, but he could afford to laugh it off. The stock had been worth much less after the Wall Street Crash anyway. A few days before the TWA crash GM had purchased 30% of WAE stock giving them almost 15% of TWA and a further 12% of GAC, and therefore outright control of GAC, for just $90,000.
Bob Noorduyn went back to Canada to found his own company where he would design the perfect replacement for his all important Fokker Universal. The Norseman would be a worthy successor.
There is an important postscript.
Say hello to the British engineer Sir John Siddeley who in 1928 purchased Avro from Alliot Verdon Roe allowing Roe to go off to build flying boats with Saunders. On acquisition Avro still had too many factories employing too many carpenters and too few metal workers. The company needed an off the shelf interim product with a tubular metal fuselage, but with a wooden wing. With WW1 now a fading memory Siddeley obtained an exclusive licence to manufacture Fokker Trimotors for sale in the British Empire outside North America under his newly acquired Avro brand. This included the right to build the Fokker patent wooden wing for use on any Avro branded aircraft, trimotor or otherwise, provided a royalty was paid on each one.
Avro were blessed with a skilled designer called Roy Chadwick who eventually realised that the only thing wrong with the Fokker patent thick wooden wing was that it was simply in the wrong place. If it were instead under the fuselage it could be fitted with short travel main gear retracting into the existing Fokker patent tubular metal framework of the existing engine nacelles to create a modern low wing monoplane that would be cheap and easy for all the surplus carpenters to manufacture.
The surplus carpenters at Avro now produced a lot more of the same Fokker patent wooden wings they were already producing, except the fuselage attachment points were now on top. Refuelling, engine changes and maintenance became much simpler with the Fokker patent thick wooden wing set low. Of course the latest Avro aircraft was normally powered by (Armstrong) Siddeley engines.
Say hello to the Avro Anson. From first delivery to Imperial Airways in 1935 until 1946 the Fokker winged Anson easily outsold the grand total of every Fokker aircraft in history, never mind the ones with wooden wings. It sold roughly double the number of all Lockheed Electras and Beech 18s put together. The only propliner to be built in larger numbers than the Anson was the DC-3 and its many derivatives, but of course only if you include illegal Lisunov Li-2 production in the Soviet Union, otherwise the DC-3 ranks a poor second to the Anson.
Far from being obsolete in 1931 Fokker didn't even live to see most of 'his' patent wooden wings take flight. He died in 1939. Production of the Fokker patent wooden wing did not peak until the early 1940s.
The third most produced 'propliner' of all time was also wooden winged. The Airspeed Oxford was designed by Neville Shute Norway of 'No Highway' fame, in collaboration with others, long after 1931. The Oxford had flaps. It did not need the Fokker patent wing, but all wooden wings were cheap to produce and Airspeed only employed carpenters.
There was nothing unsafe within the Fokker patent thick wooden wing, or other wooden wings in general, whatever Americans had been persuaded to believe by the carefully orchestrated whispering campaign of 1931. Henry Ford wasn't guessing when he said 'history is bunk'.
Of course wooden wings built in the 1920s did ultimately have a problem. The organic glue used to bond the wood together had a limited life span before it began to degrade, but it was the lifespan of the glue, not the lifespan of the wood that was limiting. By the time the Anson and Oxford entered series production wholly synthetic glues had replaced glues made from the sticky bits of dead animals. Even so late production Ansons manufactured between 1946 and 1953 had evolved metal wings. Certification standards evolved as the decades passed and great aircraft were able to evolve to match an ever changing environment
Finally it occurs to me that if the second most produced 'propliner' in history had been American and had been designed by a famous American author, someone would probably have produced an MDL compatible with at least one version of MSFS by now, but that's life. <Sigh>.
Regards,
FSAviator
Further comments from FSAviator:
There were (at least) a couple of errors in my recent contribution. The Airco D.H.4s used by the USAAC, which Fokker was brought in to 'fix' were of course known as 'Flaming Coffins' due to their propensity to burst into flames for 'mysterious' reasons.
In the final paragraph my reference to the second most produced 'propliner' should have read third. I am a happy user of the Avro Anson MDL and panel by Garwood, Booker and Maurri. It is the Airspeed Oxford, of which over 8,500 served around the world, designed by Neville Shute Norway, which has never been produced for FS use.
On rereading my post I may not have answered the following question from FSresearcher as explicitly as I intended,
<<Anyways, Fokker was planning to build a huge factory in Los Angeles in 1929. Does anyone know if they did, in fact, build this factory? All the hype for the factory ends with the stock market crash.>>
In 1929 the airport in Los Angeles was Glendale Airport. The factory was at Glen Dale in West Virginia. Around the web and elsewhere you may find articles which confuse Glendale with Glen Dale. As far as I know there was no plan to build a factory in both places.
One further comment on Fokker before a quick comment on the radio range beta.
<<(Fokker) apparently stole an Austrian patent for his First World War machine gun interrupter gear while in Germany and usurped any number of design innovations from a Reinhold Platz, a Fokker engineer>>
Usurped may be a good way to put it, but of course if a company employs someone as a designer they can patent or copyright anything he designs. What Fokker did, and has been widely criticised for, was to claim he had personally invented many of the technologies that he lawfully patented. I have the impression that he held the patents personally and then licensed them to his companies, but that would have been so that it did not matter who won the war.
<<By the way, are you aware of the Radio Range project, available for download? >>
No I was not previously aware of that project. I have now downloaded it. It seems to do exactly what it is supposed to do though I am unclear whether change of MAGVAR has been correctly incorporated. I am pleased to see that the need for approach procedures has been catered for. There are some disadvantages relating to historical placement versus modern FS9 runway placement, but they are worth putting up with. Well done to all concerned.
The procedures in the beta call for QFG after departure but assume VMC. Without using the procedures within part 4 of the propliner tutorial users are likely to collide with terrain in many locations. In the relevant era descent was apt to be at =>700 VSI and climb at only 500 VSI. The departure is potentially more dangerous than the arrival. Not all routes are along a coast.
It allows use of intersections using Audio + VAR when a VOR 1 receiver is used to emulate the Signal Corps Receiver.
Outside the geographical coverage of the new system, outside the historical coverage of the new system, the procedures in part 2 of the propliner tutorial remain the best way to simulate radio ranges within FS9.
I have a feeling that the fact that both the pre existing freeware Vega and the FS9 Vega include a Radio Range Receiver = Visual Audio Receiver = VAR = US Signal Corps Receiver that does not actually work as a Signal Corps Receiver in MSFS, only because there were no LF stations to receive and display, has left many users of MSFS with the idea that audio was the only means by which the Radio Range signals were received and the procedures flown.
The remaining issue which the project has not addressed is therefore the fact that MS coded the default Signal Corps Receiver in the Vega so that it could only work with MF signals and only as an obscured arc ADF. That was always the problem with the freeware precursor SCR = VAR gauge by Ernie Kennedy. Either the FS9 default SCR bitmap needs to be aliased from VOR code so that the real Signal Corps Receiver graphics will work with VHF signals for simulation of Radio Ranges anywhere, and in any era, or the new LF code ideally needs to be augmented and incorporated within the default Signal Corps Receiver gauge to drive it when tuned to LF so that it works prototypically as a Radio Range Visual Audio Receiver and not only as an obscured arc ADF.
It is possible, but it may be complicated. I do not understand xml well enough to know.
Regards,
FSAviator
And FSAviator comments:
<<The Wall Street Journal said that 1929 was on track to be Fokker America's best year ever. >>
Well it was certainly Anthony Fokker's best year ever.
Thanks for further clarifying the California connection. I had never heard of the F-32 being called a DP-32.
The launch customer was Universal Airlines. On its inaugural flight from Newark in 1929 Universal made sure the entire press corps turned up. It got airborne, had an engine failure, and promptly crashed. No one was ever going to fly in an F-32 owned by Universal after that. Crashes were two a penny, but it was a bad idea to invite the press to witness the event.
Universal blamed Fokker and refused to take any more. The row got ugly. As part of the process of turning Fokker into another General Motors brand GM simply bought Universal and the row went away. By now Anthony Fokker had sold 80% of the company and WAE owned 40%. Someone else had to order some F-32s, and quickly. Consequently it was WAE who got lumbered.
Over the next year Bob Noorduyn redesigned his horribly owerweight F-32 to have big Hornet engines in place of small Wasp engines. This enabled it to fly on only three engines at low altitude. My earlier post omitted a step. After the failure of the F-32 Noorduyn became chief designer at Bellanca before heading off to Canada.
So when WAE pretended to 'inaugurate' F-32 services in 1930, on a different coast, with lots of dancing girls on hand to amuse the press, it was to erase the memory of the real inaugural flight made by Universal in 1929.
With four big Hornet engines the F-32 was now only as unsafe as any other airliner of 1930, but it was horrendously expensive, costing 110K to buy and a matching amount to run. The F-X trimotor cost half that. WAE had to tolerate two F-32s for several months, but was soon almost insolvent trying to run them, which is how GM came to buy the controlling interest in WAE for only 90K, a few days before an F-X flown by their subsidiary TWA killed the Notre Dame football coach in March 1931.
Just a few months after the dancing girls had gone home, and America had been given the appropriately false impression, WAE did the sensible thing. They hired two men and a really big saw. Before they could hack the second one to bits some guy turned up and said he wanted the other one to adorn his gas station. He bought it for a few bucks. It was the only example to survive for more than a couple of years. The rest of the WAE order was also built to save face, but they never took delivery.
GM fitted one out as a 'GM corporate office' and tried to convince the press that they were actually going to fly it. Then they circulated rumours about millionaires wanting to buy them. Then they used their political influence to get the USAAC to test another as the YC-20 during 1931, but not surprisingly the USAAC rejected it. More men with big saws were hired and that was the end of the Fokker F-32.
A dinosaur is still a dinosaur even when it’s a brontosaurus.
Regards,
FSAviator