Franz Xaver More

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Franz Xaver Mehr (born November 23, 1896 in Bettensweiler, today Wangen im Allgäu ; † December 8, 1981 ) was a German aircraft designer .

Life

Franz Xaver Mehr was born as one of nine children on the family's farm between Wangen and Lindau . He began to study engineering at the Technical Center Konstanz and built in his parents' barn a self-designed monoplane with five-cylinder - rotary engine . In January 1916 he passed his pilot's examination at Gustav Otto's flight school in Munich. Called up during World War I, he worked as a technical draftsman in an aircraft factory. After the war, he completed his studies in Constance and founded in Wielandsweiler in Tettnang the grove & More GmbH, Electro-technical installation Office, motors & agricultural machinery because of the terms of the contracts of Versailles of aircraft in the German Reich of the Weimar Republic was initially banned completely . Together with several like-minded people, he founded the local glider pilot group Wangen at the end of 1926 , for which he designed several school gliders.

From 1929 he designed the Me 1 “Maschinchen” motorized aircraft with a wingspan of 10 m and a length of 6.15 meters in Lindau on Lake Constance , whose DKW engine was supplied by Zschopauer Motorenwerke J. S. Rasmussen (part of Auto Union from 1932 ). The air-cooled two-cylinder - two stroke - boxer engine type TL 500 9 kW (12 hp) came from the DKW parent plant in Zschopau. The wings were removable and could be stowed along the fuselage so that the machine could be transported on the road with a width of less than two meters. In March 1930 the Me 1 took off on its maiden flight from the Friedrichshafen - Löwental airfield . Later the Me 1 was equipped with the more powerful U2 engine (15/20 HP) from Ursinus , which was actually intended for the Me 2, but which was not built due to lack of money. The Me 3 with an air-cooled DKW parallel twin was tested in Friedrichshafen in 1931. The more aircraft Meckenbeuren built the Friedrichshafen Me 4 , a training and performance glider Easter is tested 1932nd From the same year, Mehr cooperated with Auto Union and sold its powered aircraft as "DKW Erla" to Erla in the Erzgebirge, where the machines were to be manufactured by Nestler  &  Breitfeld GmbH ( Eisenhüttenwerk Erla ), with the abbreviation Me being retained. Nestler & Breitfeld was taken over by Rasmussen's Zschopauer Motorenwerke back in the 1920s.

After the seizure of the Nazis he developed 1933-1934 from the Friedrichshafen Me 4 the motor glider Me 4a (in the press also referred to as Me 5), the strong with a 10 kW (14 hp) drive equipped, but to lack of interest on the part of Reichswehr remained a unique piece. In 1934, Mehr presented the single - seater low- wing aircraft Erla Me 5A with a more powerful water-cooled DKW two-cylinder two-stroke engine of the type FL 600 with an output of 20 hp. The manufacturing company was now the newly founded Erla Maschinenwerk in Leipzig- Heiterblick in mid-1934 .

In order to demonstrate the versatility of his small aircraft, which he thought of as “people's planes”, the new water-cooled four-cylinder in- line engine of the Z9-092 type with a displacement of 2 liters and 50 hp take-off power was installed in an Erla machine in 1937 . The aircraft, now called Erla Me 5D, was lengthened to 6.80 m for this. The only machine was finished in June 1938 and was first presented to the public a month later at the Air Show in Belgrade with the registration number D-YMOP . On April 1, 1939, Erla-Werkpilot Friedrich (Fritz) Aufermann took off with D-YMOP at Berlin-Tempelhof airport for the "Europe-Africa-Asia-Europe flight" over three continents and arrived on May 20 after a distance of 20,000 Kilometers to the destination Leipzig. In class C, 4th category (up to 2 liters displacement), works pilot Heinz Gabler set a new long-distance record on August 2, 1939, when he with the D-YMOP, which was now equipped with a closed cockpit, without a stopover from Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance flew over 1915 kilometers to Vännäs in Sweden.

The economic success failed to materialize and so only a few Erla Me 5 were built as training aircraft.

Franz Xaver Mehr joined the NSDAP on January 1, 1940 and was appointed as chief designer and head of the production department in October 1944 as authorized signatory of the Erla machine works. After the end of the war, he and his wife left the plant on June 27, 1945 for Darmstadt. There he turned down the American offer to move to the USA and the couple first moved to Mehr's brother Georg in Deuchelried near Wangen im Allgäu.

The aircraft designer Mehr died on December 8, 1981 and was buried in Lindau- Aeschach .

In Switzerland , the only existing Erla machine with the aircraft registration HB-SEX is approved, an Erla 5A built in Leipzig in 1934 with the serial number. 14. Instead of the original water-cooled 0.6-liter two-cylinder two-stroke engine from DKW with 20 hp, the machine has an air-cooled 1.5-liter four-cylinder boxer engine from Volkswagen with around 40 hp.

literature

  • Karl-Dieter Seifert: DKW and the Erla Me aircraft: 1926 to 1945 , from the series Pictures of Aviation , Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2011 (1st edition), ISBN 978-3-86680-852-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FliegerRevue March 2010, pp. 56–59, Erla-Gerner-Gotha - car manufacturers try their hand at the Volksflugzeug
  2. ↑ Erla 5A, HB-SEX on veterano.ch ( Memento from August 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME More, Franz Xaver
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German aircraft designer
DATE OF BIRTH November 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Bettensweiler, today Wangen im Allgäu
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 1981