Focke-Wulf Fw 200

Focke-Wulf Fw 200
Fw 200 of the Danish Det Danske Luftfartselskab A / S , (1939)
Type:	Long-haul airliner / maritime patrol , long-range bomber
Design country:	German Empire
Manufacturer:	Focke-Wulf
First flight:	July 27, 1937
Number of pieces:	276

The Focke-Wulf Fw 200 " Condor " (referred to by the Allies as a "messenger") is a four-engine low-wing -Langstrecken airliner for 26 passengers and a crew of four, that of Andreas von Faehlmann and Ludwig Mittelhuber at Focke-Wulf in Bremen developed has been. Of the 276 Fw 200s built, the Luftwaffe used 263 machines as maritime patrols , long-range bombers and transport aircraft during World War II .

history

Civil use

After just one year of development, the model completed its maiden flight on July 27, 1937 . The subsequent test flights were so convincing that Lufthansa immediately commissioned the first series. Some Fw 200 A and the first larger series version Fw 200 B followed.

On August 10, 1938, the Fw 200 V1 “Condor” (D-ACON, Lufthansa name “Brandenburg”), serial no. 2000, Lufthansa under the command of flight captain Alfred Henke and with Captain Rudolf von Moreau (2nd pilot), Paul Dierberg (head radio operator) and Walter Kober (head radio operator) as the first land-based long-haul passenger aircraft non-stop on the 6,371.302 kilometers long route from Berlin-Staaken to Floyd Bennett Field in New York City in 24 hours, 56 minutes and 12 seconds; this corresponded to an average speed of 255.499 km / h. On the return flight from Floyd Bennett Field to Berlin-Tempelhof , the machine covered a distance of 6,392 km in 19 hours and 55 minutes; this corresponded to an average speed of 321 km / h.

Böttcherstraße (Bremen), memorial plaque Condor record flight

Focke-Wulf Fw 200 B "Condor" of Lufthansa (model)

Both flights were recognized by the FAI as flight path records, category 2 (record with crew).

On November 28, 1938, the D-ACON took off from Berlin-Tempelhof on another record flight with three stopovers with the same crew and on-board warden Georg Kohne (Focke-Wulf) and Consul Heinz Junge (Director of Focke-Wulf-Flugzeugbau GmbH Berlin) in Basra, Karachi and Hanoi to Tokyo (arrival in Tokyo on November 30, 1938). On this flight, the Condor flew a total of 13,844 km in 46 hours and 18 minutes. This corresponds to an average speed of 192 km / h (including ground times in Basra, Karachi and Hanoi). On the return flight, D-ACON had to make an emergency landing in Cavite Bay off Manila on December 6, 1938 because of a defect in the fuel line.

On June 27, 1939, the D-AXFO started with flight captain Alfred Henke and flight captain Günther Schuster on the first flight of a land plane from Germany to South America (11,100 km, flight time 34:48 h). She crossed the South Atlantic from Banjul in Gambia (then Bathurst ) to Natal in the record time of 9:47 h and reached South America on June 29, 1939.

In addition to Lufthansa, the Fw 200 was also operated by the Danish Det Danske Luftfartselskab (DDL) and the Brazilian Cruzeiro do Sul .

The Fw 200 "Condor" was able to fly 1,500 kilometers in regular service with 30 people on board.

Shortly before the end of World War II, the German Fw 200 “Hessen” crashed near Egglkofen in the Mühldorf am Inn district; the bodies were not recovered until 1952.

Military use

Fw 200 C-3 (Air Force version)

Focke-Wulf Fw 200 C (Air Force version)

During the Second World War, the Fw 200 was modified for military purposes with moderate success. As a sea scout and long-range bomber, however, it was only an emergency solution due to its design. In exceptional cases, she formed a combat community with submarines .

The so-called “Führer machines” of Adolf Hitler were also converted Fw 200. The Fw 200 C-4 / U1, W.Nr. 0137, trunk identification CE + IB, was equipped with a special armchair parachute and an escape hatch through which Hitler could have got out.

Work on the reconstruction of the bomber began in 1939 at the request of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force interested in such a project . This version had more powerful engines and was named Fw 200 C; Before the completion of the first machine, however, the war broke out and the project was immediately taken up by the German Air Force for use as a sea reconnaissance aircraft. In the meantime, the civilian Fw 200 B and the few pilot series machines of the C series were brought into service as transport machines. Nine Condor cargo planes were lost during the Battle of Stalingrad . The Fw 200 C-3 / U2, WNr. 0034, fell intact into the hands of Soviet troops at Pitomnik Airfield and was extensively tested at the Air Force Research Institute . Three more specimens found in an unfinished state in production facilities at the end of the war were completed with the help of German workers and used in the polar air fleet until 1950. Series production continued until the beginning of 1944 with the successor models C-1, -2, -3, -4, -6 and -8, a total of 263 aircraft of the military variants were built, almost all of which were used in Kampfgeschwader 40 .

However, none of the models gained importance as a heavy bomber, which was due to the basic properties of the aircraft, the redesign of which would have been equivalent to a new development.

• The Luftwaffe lacked a four-engine heavy bomber. However, the Fw 200 was never designed for mass production: the cell was not constructed in a modular manner, so decentralized mass production comparable to the Junkers Ju 88 production was not possible. As a bomber, the machine was an emergency solution and when loaded it was too sluggish for low-altitude bombing (less than 1000 meters).
• The fuselage was designed too weakly for the harsh requirements of military operations. The stern fractured during landings and during strong acceleration through evasive maneuvers. From variants C-0 and C-3 onwards, attempts were made to improve this weakness by strengthening the cell, but it was not completely eliminated.
• The excellent aerodynamics, the low weight and the good usability of the interior were based on the conical shape of the fuselage, which made the installation of a stern weapon stand and a modern bombardier stand extremely complicated.
• The consistent aerodynamic construction as a modern airliner for long economical flights with passengers by Kurt Tank was in contradiction to the later military-based additions of weapon turrets and floor pan, which led to considerable losses in speed.
• The load-bearing outer skin, which made the good weight / load ratio possible, made the installation of external bomb-dropping brackets necessary, as the cell itself could not hold bombs weighing more than 250 kg; In addition, a longitudinal spar ran centrally along the cell floor so that a bomb bay could only be installed asymmetrically, which was at the expense of statics, center of gravity and aerodynamics.
• The wing spar crossed the passenger cabin directly under the floor, which made the aircraft very modern and practical as a passenger plane. However, this stood in the way of attaching the drop load in the aircraft's center of gravity, which is essential for maintaining the center of gravity after the bombing for safe flight characteristics. The design as a low middle-decker was the basis of the excellent maneuverability without servo-assisted steering gear.
• Without defined separation points, the wings , airframe and tail unit could not be dismantled individually. It was therefore hardly possible to repair a damaged Fw 200 at front airports.
• Pilot seats and combat stations were partially unarmored and offered poor fields of vision and firing for military use (no central rear gunner).
• The landing gear was designed for fixed runways, but not for field airfields.
• Self-sealing tanks were not installed; the motor gondolas were neither bulletproof nor equipped with fire fighting equipment.

With the individual prototypes, individual defects were gradually rectified, but the Fw 200 never achieved suitability in the sense of a strategic front-line aircraft.

Only with its range could it fly long and large areas of the Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean and use the "Hohentwiel" radar to locate and attack ships, such as the Empress of Britain off the north-west coast of Ireland in October 1940 . In this role she referred to Churchill as the "Scourge of the Atlantic". Flight captain Werner Thieme reported that the longest flight took 15 hours and 56 minutes and reached from Vaernes to Germanialand in Greenland , where the crew supplied a frozen navy weather ship with supplies. In addition, fuel was pumped into the fuel tanks by hand from four 200-liter barrels.

Towards the end of the war, when the attack tactics of the Fw 200 lost its effectiveness, some Condor were again assigned to transport missions for Hitler and his staff. A planned development with a larger span and V-engines with greater power, the Fw 300 , did not get beyond the design stage.

reconstruction

Since 2003, an Fw 200 has been in operation at the Airbus plant in Bremen (80% of the work and around 50 employees) as well as at Lufthansa Technik in Hamburg and Rolls-Royce Oberursel , which was lifted in the Trondheimfjord on May 26, 1999 on behalf of the German Museum of Technology in Berlin , restored and rebuilt. The aircraft had been made an emergency landing in the fjord on February 22, 1942 by captain Werner Thieme because of a defect in a landing flap that made a regular landing impossible . All six crew members were able to save themselves.

The wreck, which was discovered by Norwegian scientists in 1981 and looked stable under water, broke when it was recovered from a lifting crane in 1999. At the end of 2009, parts of a machine that crashed near Voss (Hordaland) in Norway were recovered, which can be used for reconstruction.

The stern and the landing gear are built at Lufthansa-Technik. In 2011 the inner part of the left wing was completed; later outer wings and flaps will follow. Then the right wing follows. Two original Bramo engines are installed, presumably from a Dornier Do 24 .

Due to the lack of original construction plans and detailed photographs, the reconstruction turns out to be time-consuming, as much has to be reconstructed. By 2020, the aircraft should be completed by around 60 volunteers, mostly retired aircraft manufacturers. After the reconstruction, the aircraft will be the only existing example of this type and is to be exhibited in the German Museum of Technology in Berlin .

Technical specifications

Parameter	Fw 200 C-3 data
crew	6th
length	23.85 m
span	32.84 m
height	6.30 m
Wing area
Empty mass	17,005 kg
Takeoff mass	24,520 kg
Cruising speed	280 to 297 km / h
Top speed	406 km / h at an altitude of 5,000 m
Altitude	6,450 m at 22 t mass, 8,400 m at 17.6 t mass
Service ceiling	7,350 m
Max. Range	4,490 km at 4,000 m, C-3 / U2 up to 6,400 km
Engines	four radial engines BMW-Bramo 323 R-2 each with 1,000 PS (735 kW)

• Armament: one MG FF (20 mm), five MG 15 (7.92 mm), upper fighting positions partly prepared for installation MG 131 instead of MG 15
  • Bomb load: 1,230 kg with full tanks, a maximum of 5,400 kg possible. Fuselage tray limited to 1,000 kg, 1,400 kg each under the two outer motor gondolas, 1,800 kg each possible on the outer wings.

See also

• List of aircraft types

literature

• RG Grant: Flying. The history of aviation. Dorling Kindersley Verlag GmbH, Starnberg 2003, ISBN 3-8310-0474-9 .
• Kenneth Munson: The World War II Planes. All planes of the warring powers. 20th edition. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-87943-302-X .
• Heinz J. Nowarra : Focke-Wulf Fw 200 "Condor". The story of the world's first modern long-haul aircraft. Bernard & Graefe, Koblenz 1988, ISBN 3-7637-5855-0 .
• Precision work from Bremen . In: Helmut Marrat (ed.): Perinique . World Heritage Magazine. No. 25 . Perinique, November 2016, ISSN  1869-9952 ( special issue on the Focke-Wulf 200 "Condor").

Web links

Commons : Focke-Wulf Fw 200  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Report on the rescue of the Condor in the Trondheimfjord by Stefan Doblinger

Remarks

1. ↑ According to the company tradition of that time, all Focke-Wulf aircraft had internal bird names.
2. ↑ This date was given mainly by Heinz Nowarra and William Green in their published literature and was adopted by other authors without being checked. Newer publications assume that the Fw 200 did the maiden flight with Kurt Tank and Hans Sander on September 6, 1937. The "problem-free test flights" according to Kurt Tanks must also be questioned, as they do not correspond to the protocols of Luft Hansa, which refused to take over the aircraft due to significant deficiencies.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Marton Szigeti: Focke-Wulf Fw 200 - first flight on September 6, 1937. In: Klassiker der Luftfahrt No. 6/2017, pp. 20ff.
2. ^ "Condor" record flights Berlin - New York - Berlin, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Cologne, company archive
3. ^ "Condor" record flight Berlin - Tokyo, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Cologne, company archive
4. ↑ German weekly magazine 1939
5. ↑ Lufthansa, DLH 3050-14-3
6. ^ Andrei Alexandrov, Gennadi Petrov: The German aircraft in Russian and Soviet services 1914–1951 . tape 2 . Tussa, Illertissen, ISBN 3-927132-45-4 , p. 188 .
7. ^ Wladimir Kotelnikow: Fw 200 in Russia. German prey bird in the Arctic . In: Aviation Classics . No. 3 , 2016, p. 48-53 .
8. ↑ Article on trefall.net German report on this and here ( Memento from May 16, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ Message from the Bremen press service from January 19, 2012 ( Memento of the original from January 4, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
10. ^ Article in the Badische Zeitung of June 11, 2016, online , accessed on June 11, 2016