The Flying Dutchman, Anthony Fokker, founded an aviation empire

AMONG the students who watched their aircraft project crash in Germany in 1909 was a Dutchman who would go on to become a major force in aircraft.

Dutch aviator Anthony Fokker makes first flight in his small aircraft, De Spin, in 1910.

IT was 1909 and aviation was in its infancy. But students at a technical school in Mainz, Germany, who had enrolled in an aeronautics course, were eager to be a part
of the great aerial revolution.

The students had built their own aircraft and were hoping it would showcase the skills they had mastered as part of their study.

Unfortunately, the pilot for their test flight didn’t know how to fly a plane and crashed their project. The course soon folded, partly because the students looked for something else to do after the failure of the aircraft.

But one of them, Dutch tinkerer Anton “Anthony” Fokker, was not about to give up his dream. In 1910 he built his own plane, which he called “De Spin” (The Spider) because it was a mass of wires and struts that looked a bit like a spider’s web.

But the Spider was wrecked when a business associate flew it into a tree. So Fokker built a second Spider in 1911 and, in it, earned his pilot’s licence. It was the start of a remarkable career in aviation.

 

Pioneer aviator and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker in 1912.

 

Fokker would found a company whose planes were renowned for their reliability and manoeuvrability in the skies. His aircraft were flown by some of the great pioneer aviators including German air ace Manfred Richthofen, the Red Baron, in World War I, American Richard E. Byrd, who flew a Fokker over the south pole, and Australian Charles Kingsford Smith, whose most famous aircraft the Southern Cross was a Fokker F.VIIb/3m TriMotor monoplane.

Fokker was born Anton Herman Gerard Fokker, 128 years ago today on April 6, 1890, in Java, (then known as the Dutch East Indies), where his father ran a coffee plantation. When he was four the family returned to the Netherlands so he could be educated at Dutch schools. But he wasn’t much of an academic. He preferred tinkering with mechanical things, so his father sent him to Germany to be trained as an auto mechanic. But in 1908, he had seen flying demonstrations by Wilbur Wright in France, which fired his imagination. So he transferred to the aeronautics course in Mainz.

 

Anthony Fokker (left) during World War I with Manfred von Richthofen (second left) and two German officers.

German pilot Rittmeister Baron Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen (the Red Baron) in his Fokker Dreidekker 1 aeroplane in World War I.

Although that course eventually foundered after the crash of the class project in 1909, Fokker returned to the Netherlands where he built his own aircraft and taught himself to fly.

He became known as the mad “Flying Dutchman” after giving his own flying demonstrations. In 1912 he set up an aircraft factory at Johannisthal, near Berlin, but struggled until the outbreak of war in 1914. He offered his services to both sides but the British and French weren’t interested so his factory was taken over by the Germany government,
who geared it up for manufacturing and developing military aircraft.

Among his triumphs were the Fokker Dreidekker I, the plane that made the Red Baron infamous. His factory is also credited with developing the mechanism that synchronised machine guns to allow pilots to shoot forward at other planes without damaging their propeller. However, Fokker’s contribution is disputed.

At the end of the war, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles banned the manufacture of aircraft or aircraft engines so Fokker moved his operations back to the Netherlands.

To avoid having his planes confiscated or destroyed he smuggled aircraft and aircraft parts in goods trains, liberally bribing officials along the way.

 

Explorer Richard Byrd and the Fokker aeroplane he used in his North Pole flight in 1926.

Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith's Fokker tri-motor plane, the "Southern Cross".

Ansett's first plane, a single-engine Fokker F-XI (FXI) Universal monoplane, was used on the Hamilton (Victoria) to Melbourne route in 1935.

German aircraft designer Anthony Fokker in the 1930s.

Business soon picked up again, because many pioneer aviators were WWI veterans who admired and respected Fokker aircraft. And many of his orders came from the US, both private buyers and the military.

However, his personal life was tumultuous. In 1923 he divorced his wife Sophie, a niece of Hermann Goerring, whom he had married in 1919. In 1926 he moved to the US and, the following year married Canadian woman Violet Eastman, who soon became unhappy because Fokker was a workaholic. She suffered mental health problems and died after falling out of the window of their New York apartment. It was ruled a suicide.

The reputation of his aircraft continued to grow through the feats of aviators such as Kingsford Smith, who made the first crossing of the Pacific from Oakland, California, to Brisbane in 1928, while Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

In his 1931 autobiography Fokker told readers: “My life has been paced by the aeroplane. Hurtling through space on what now seems a predestined course, I had no idea what that course was. Most of the time I merely hung on.”

He died in 1939 of pneumococcal meningitis.

 

Originally published as The Flying Dutchman, Anthony Fokker, founded an aviation empire