Paul John Hall

Paul John Hall (born January 6, 1895 in Riga , † June 8, 1973 in Augsburg ) was a German engineer and aircraft designer of German-Baltic descent.

Live and act

After graduating from high school, Hall completed a degree in mechanical engineering in his native Riga , which he successfully completed in 1918. In 1920 he moved to the Kyffhäuser - Technikum in Bad Frankenhausen to study aircraft construction. After receiving his diploma in 1922, he took up a job in the Netherlands at NV Nederlandsche Vocityuigenfabriek Fokker in Amsterdam , where he worked in the design department headed by Walter Rethel and in the areas of factory standardization, material testing and production control .

In 1925 Hall went back to Germany and got a job at Dietrich Flugzeugwerke AG in Kassel on April 1st, initially as head of production control and a little later as head of the design office. In this capacity, he designed this as a high-wing monoplane designed sports and touring aircraft DP IX , were produced by the nine copies, as well as the sport biplane DP XI. Hall's employer Richard Dietrich had separated from his partner Anatole Gobiet shortly before he joined the company , which prompted his two employees, Antonius Raab and Kurt Katzenstein, to set up their own company on November 16, 1925 with Gobiet as their sponsor, the Raab-Katzenstein- Flugzeugwerke (RaKa) to found. Hall then, like most of Dietrich's employees, moved to Raab-Katzenstein and there, together with Andreas von Faehlmann and Erich Gammelin, first developed the successful class and aerobatic aircraft Kl I "Schwalbe" from his design DP XI , of which over 40 were built were. In the following three years Hall was responsible for the construction of almost all aircraft types designed by RaKa: the RK 2 "Pelican" , RK 7 "Butterfly" , RK 9 "Warbler" and RK 25 as well as the RK 26 "Tiger Tern" designed by Gerhard Fieseler " .

With effect from December 31, 1928, Hall left Raab-Katzenstein and at the beginning of 1929 switched to the Bavarian Aircraft Works (BFW) in Augsburg as head of the construction group for sports and training aircraft , where he was subordinate to Technical Director Willy Messerschmitt . There he constructed the types M23c , M27 and M29, which were repeatedly issued in the literature as Messerschmitt designs . When Messerschmitt had to file for bankruptcy in 1931, Hall lost his job at the end of 1932, as did a large part of the BFW workforce, but in the same year found a new job in Warnemünde at Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke as a department head in the construction office for mixed construction. Shortly before his discharge from BFW, in November 1932 he had worked out the project of a training aircraft designed as a biplane with the designation M32, which he now brought to Heinkel as the He 72 "Kadett" and which, with over 700 units built, became an extremely successful standard The Luftwaffe's trainer aircraft should be.

In 1936 Hall went back to Kassel and joined the design department of the Gerhard Fieseler Works as head of a design office with effect from February 1 , where he was involved in the development of the Fieseler Storch with a focus on the fuselage and landing gear. At the end of June 1940 he left Fieseler again. His next employment relationship led him to Junkers in Dessau under Heinrich Hertel as technical director and head of the Groppler development department to develop the large cargo glider Ju 322 "Mammut" in the area of ​​detailed construction. This task was entrusted to him because, contrary to the all-metal construction previously used by Junkers, the Ju 322 was made entirely of wood and Hall was a recognized specialist in this field. In 1944 he switched to the control manager of Focke-Wulf-Flugzeugbau AG in their branch in Posen , where he also saw the end of the war. After that Paul John Hall no longer appeared as an aircraft designer.

literature

• Rolf Nagel, Thorsten Bauer: Kassel and the aviation industry since 1923. History (s), people, technology. A. Bernecker., Melsungen 2015, ISBN 978-3-87064-147-4
• Marton Szigeti: Raab-Katzenstein. Kassel stories. In: Classics of Aviation No. 1/2014, p. 56ff.
• Marton Szigeti: Heinkel He 72. Away with the old planes! In: Classics of Aviation No. 2/2017, p. 46ff.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Horst Lommel: Junkers Ju 287. The world's first jet bomber and other swept wing projects. Aviatic, Oberhaching 2003, ISBN 3-925505-74-1 , p. 204