Designation system for aircraft from Dornier

The designation system for aircraft from Dornier has been subject to numerous changes since the company was founded in 1917 as Zeppelin-Werk Lindau GmbH until the post-war Dornier GmbH .

Until 1922

In the early days of Dornier aircraft construction, a system was used that was based on the military designations of the time (see classification of German military aircraft in World War I ). Capital letters denoted the class of use, seaplanes also received an "s", followed by a consecutive Roman number. Even after the end of the war in 1918, Zeppelin-Werk Lindau GmbH (ZWL) retained this system, although only civil aircraft were developed. Even the numbering was partially continued, so the new commercial flying boat "Delphin" was given the designation Cs II as a continuation of the sequence that began with the seaplane Cs I in the First World War. The land transport aircraft "Komet" was also given the designation C III, because Dornier had already created the CI and C II models in the last years of the war . Since there was no forerunner in the G-Class, the first twin-engine airliner was given the designation GI "Greif" in 1920 . The Dornier “Wal” was given the designation Dornier Gs II in 1919/20 because the Gs I was regarded as its predecessor. The Gs II, the progenitor of all Dornier “whales”, however, had to be scrapped in the spring of 1921 in a half-finished state, because the Inter-Allied Aviation Monitoring Commission (ILÜK) classified the design as a military aircraft.

1922 to 1924

At the beginning of 1922, the use of the old military identifiers was discontinued and all Dornier patterns, both in internal use and in external publications, were addressed by their names (dolphin, whale, dragonfly, falcon, etc.). This change coincides with the change of the company name from Zeppelin-Werk Lindau GmbH to Dornier Metallbauten GmbH (DMB).

1924 to 1931

Delphin II (plant no. 44, later Do L) of the "Bodensee Aerolloyd", Lindau

In October 1924, the designation system was changed to a new system based on the "Do plus letter" pattern. The company assigned the letters according to its own specifications; there was no longer any relationship to the military aircraft classes. The samples under construction (work number 54 - 58) were assigned the first five letters of the alphabet in ascending order of work numbers. No system can be seen in the further allocation of the letters. B. absolutely not chronological. From 1926 onwards, some older designs from the years 1921 to 1922 were retrospectively given an identification letter. For the single-seater "Falke" this was Do H , Delphin II became Do L and Komet I / II became Do P. The whale was renamed "Do J".

In some cases, Dornier deliberately used the code letters of the predecessor for a successor model. The distinction was made by an appended number, first in Roman, from 1930 also in Arabic. Examples are the "Do L Delphin II" and "Do L II Delphin III", "Do J" and "Do J II" whale. However, there were also cases in which the repeated use of the code letter was not clearly related to the initial use. For example B. no relationship between the single-engine airliner "Do P Komet II" and the four-engine Do P bomber from 1928/29.

The designation system was expanded with an appended three-letter code in 1926. The first letter stood for the engine (e.g. B = BMW, G = Gnome-Rhône, J = Junkers, R = Rolls-Royce, etc.). This letter was capitalized, while the following two were capitalized. The second stood for the type of use (a = traffic, e = testing ?, i = military, o = post, transocean). The third letter was used to distinguish between land aircraft (l) and sea aircraft (s).

From 1931

In 1931 the German aviation industry began to introduce a uniform designation system. It consisted of a company code and a subsequent number. The Army Weapons Office with the civil camouflage company "Manufacturing GmbH" was behind the efforts. The Reich Aviation Ministry established in 1933 continued this system (see RLM type list ) without changes. Dornier received the company abbreviation "Do" and a reserved number block from 10 to 30. The Do 10 appeared as the first Dornier model in official correspondence, the Do 11 was the first Dornier aircraft to be named according to the new system from the start used. One quirk that was only practiced at Dornier was the use of odd numbers for land planes and even numbers for sea planes. After the Second World War, Dornier used unused numbers for his new designs such as B. Thu 25 , Thu 27 , Thu 28 . The distinction between land and sea aircraft by odd and even identification numbers was abandoned.

literature

• Günter Frost, Karl Kössler , Volker Koos: Dornier - from the beginnings to 1945 , HEEL Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-86852-049-1 , p. 197 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dornier Cs I ( Memento of the original from November 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Standardization efforts of the manufacturing company of the Heereswaffenamt