Qualla: Fokker

Fokker: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Drako.7, CC BY-SA 4.0. One aircraft has been named in the text of a peace treaty. When Germany capitulated in November 1918, the Allies wrote into the armistice terms that every Fokker D.VII be handed over — not the type in general, that specific machine. No other aeroplane has been paid that compliment. It was designed by a former welder, Reinhold Platz, for a company founded in Germany by a 21-year-old Dutchman who spent the rest of his life outrunning the reputation he earned building it.

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Image: Drako.7 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fokker: A Dutchman in Schwerin

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krzysztof Golik, CC BY-SA 4.0. Anthony Fokker was twenty-one and studying in Germany when he flew the Spin — the Spider, his own design — around a church tower in Haarlem to become the first Dutchman to fly a Dutch-built aircraft over the Netherlands. He stayed in Germany because that was where the money and t...

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Image: Krzysztof Golik | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fokker: The Gun That Fired Through the Propeller

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. His first design produced in numbers for the Germans, the M.5, was close to a copy of the Morane-Saulnier G, rebuilt with a steel-tube fuselage. What made it lethal was an addition. Firing a machine gun forward meant firing through one's own propeller arc, and Fokker developed a ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 2.0

Fokker: Six Trainloads and a New Name

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1919, owing the German state enormous sums in back taxes — 14,250,000 marks in income tax alone — Fokker went home. He founded a new works near Amsterdam with backing from the Steenkolen Handels Vereniging and called it the Nederlandse Vliegtuigenfabriek — the Dutch Aircraft F...

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Image: Matti Blume | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fokker: Wood Rot Over Kansas

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Pingstone, Public domain. The reversal came from an unglamorous direction. In 1931 a Transcontinental & Western Air Fokker F-10 came apart over Kansas, and the investigation traced the structural failure to rot in the wooden wing. Among the dead was Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach, which turne...

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Image: Adrian Pingstone | Public domain

Fokker: Friendship, Fellowship, and 15 March 1996

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joris, CC BY-SA 3.0. The rebuild was slow and undignified — gliders, autobuses, converting war-surplus Dakotas. Then the S-11 trainer sold, the S-14 Machtrainer became one of the world's first purpose-built jet trainers, and a new factory opened beside Schiphol in 1951. The F-27 Friendship of 1958 be...

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Image: Joris | CC BY-SA 3.0