Fokker: A transatlantic biography

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 1999 by Lyth, Peter

Marc Dierikx, Fokker: a transatlantic biography, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC and London (1997), 250 pp, $35.00.

Biographies are not often reviewed in these pages, but the early years of the aircraft industry are so inextricably linked with the personal fortunes of a handful of engineers and entrepreneurs that the student of air transport history cannot afford to neglect such a rich source of information. This biography, published in the Smithsonian History of Aviation series, falls into this category. It describes the life of one of air transport's most colourful characters, the Dutchman Anthony Fokker, whose combat aircraft first captured the world's attention in the midst of the First World War and whose name lived on in civil airframe production until the 1990s.

Written in lively style by Dr Marc Dierikx, the book tells the story of how Tony Fokker - an unlikable eccentric combined family wealth and a keen business instinct to found aircraft manufacturing concerns on both sides of the Atlantic. The son of a coffee plantation owner from the Dutch East Indies, Fokker did badly at school but had a gift for making things with his hands. Having dropped out of school and been discharged from the army, he managed to build his first aircraft in Germany in 1910. By the outbreak of the war Fokker had set up both a flying school and production facilities for manufacturing his own aircraft at Schwerin in north Germany. The war brought orders from the German army for his MS fighter, which he copied from a salvaged French Morane-Saulnier. Then came the 'invention' which revolutionised air warfare over the western front and with which Fokker's name is most often connected: the synchronised machine gun that could fire through the arc of an aircraft's propeller without shooting the propeller itself to pieces. Fokker solved the problem by adapting an earlier patent taken out by the Swiss engineer Franz Schneider and in doing so launched a decadelong legal battle with Schneider, who claimed infringement.

Tony Fokker was a pilot rather than an engineer, and in the design of his aircraft he preferred practical experimentation with countless prototypes to theoretical calculation. According to Dierikx, he and his chief engineer Reinhold Platz had 'little knowledge of or regard for aerodynamic theory', but they seem to have had a keen eye for the useful innovations of others. For example, Fokker took the cantilever wing which was developed during the war by Hugo Junkers and adapted it with a veneer plywood covering technique which he learnt from a Swedish associate. This 'Fokker wing' remained basically unchanged in his aircraft for the next twenty years.

In the 1920s, capitalising on his reputation from the war, Fokker set about building a series of civil airliners, first in Holland and then in the United States. From the tri-motored FVII to the Super Universal, Fokker's planes were among the commonest aircraft used by American and European airlines. However, in the 1930s Fokker's persistent quality control problems, and his unwillingness to invest in new technology and fundamental research, proved to be his downfall. When General Motors took a large stake in Fokker's American company in 1929 its engineers found his New Jersey plant using obsolete techniques. Reluctant to make the switch to all-metal construction like his rivals Douglas and Lockheed, Fokker gambled on the success of the giant F-32 in 1929, but this aircraft was badly designed and only two were ever sold. Finally, having lost control of his American company in 1931 and fallen out of favour in Holland with the boss of the Dutch flag carrier KLM, Fokker more or less abandoned aircraft construction and concentrated on playing a role as middleman in the marketing of new American creations such as the Douglas DC-2 and the Lockheed Electra.

In his conclusion Dierikx claims that Fokker was 'crucial' in facilitating the penetration of American aircraft into the European air transport market in the 1930s. This seems doubtful. The Douglas and Lockheed types were so intrinsically more advanced than European transport aircraft by the mid-1930s (compare the DC-2 with the Junkers Ju-52) that it was inevitable that European airlines would buy them if they were allowed to do so.

It is tempting to see Anthony Fokker as something of a dilettante in the early aviation industry. However, as an engineer with no formal training and a businessman with a capricious attitude towards his companies' development, he was not untypical of the first generation of air transport pioneers. As Dierikx shows in the case of Fokker, the shift in the aircraft industry in the 1930s 'from building a relatively small series of customized aircraft to mass-producing all-metal airplanes of standardized design' proved too difficult for many of them - particularly in Europe. It is Dierikx's achievement in this book to have captured the atmosphere of the aircraft industry in the period before the shift, to tell a story with a collection of characters, many of whom, like Fokker himself, were altogether larger than life.