Fokker F.II: Fokker's ressurection

[LesterBoffo]

I've renamed the title of this thread because I don't think anyone has a flipping clue what I gabbing on about here.

So nearly a century ago the Armistice happened on 11/11/1918, and Germany was under some pretty strict industrial privations, and war reparations, and one of them was that all of the Fokker DVII aircraft were to be immediately destroyed or handed over to the Allies.

Anthony Fokker was a pretty shrewd CEO, and had taken the remaining stock of his D.VII production line into the shop, lengthened the fuselages and changed the fuselages and wings planforms, and claimed the new Fokker DVII was a transport plane to keep his factory from being taken over and his aircraft from being confiscated.

In the mean time he and his production crew had quietly loaded most of his tooling and production line onto an appropriated train. ( Post war Germany was really in a state of chaos at this time..) He and all his factory crew, tooling fixtures and most of the "D.VII's were hurriedly rushed by rail to the Dutch border where they all managed to cross into Holland without triggering a small skirmish, or alerting the Allied oversight committee. And in a small start planted the seed for the entire airline industry in a country without restriction of horsepower or military production.

KLM was founded in 1919 as a way for a Dutch corporation to enter the fledgling airliner business. They needed a small airliner that wasn't derivative of some of the WWI era twin engine bombers, like those ones being planned by France and the England. Funny how they hung their initial hopes on an aircraft company that had to smuggle it's own factory, ( and aircraft..) out of post WWI Germany.

I was playing around in AC3D with an old FS-WWI 3D model a few days ago. made a rudimentary FDM and fine tuned some cockpit features. The Fokker DVII's 3D shape files from Fighter Squadron WWI will play a small part in the making of this model, but it will be it's own original 3D by the time I get the outlines and shapefiles finished. The Fokker F.II; the world's first purpose built airliner built from the leftovers of the Fokker DVII production lines repatriated back in to the Netherlands. So in a way I'm mirroring the original's genesis.

[LesterBoffo]

The prototype F.II made it's first flight near Oct 1919. It was powered by the same BMW IIIa 200 HP engine that powered the late model Fokker D.VII.

It had a somewhat comfortable seating arrangement for 4 passengers in a stagecoach like setting with two bench seats facing one another. The floor was carpeted and the 'box' of the passenger enclosure was sealed and insulated with a rudimentary heating system. There was room for take-on luggage and little cupboards and stash areas in the compartment. The one downside to the design was the pretty tall step-up height to the passenger box which required a small step stool/ladder. Reportedly faster than the converted DH-4 airliners it originally suffered from overheating of the engine which necessitated a new radiator and engine enclosure. The first livery was quite striking. One of Fokker's test pilots took the prototype out with one of the modified DVII's being flown by another test pilot, and they had a mock dogfight, and the new airliner proved itself to be agile and would have shown itself to be capable of nearly every stunt and defensive move much smaller WWI fighters were capable of. The design was the start of the more successful F.VI and FVII single and trimotored airliners to follow.