Built on two bankruptcies

BFW was born out of other people’s failures. The Augsburg company was formed in 1926 when the remains of Udet Flugzeugbau, the Munich firm of the First World War ace Ernst Udet, were turned into a joint-stock company with backing from the Bavarian state. That same year it bought the halls and works airfield on the Haunstetter Strasse in Augsburg left behind by the bankrupt Bayerische Rumpler-Werke. Its first bread and butter was Udet’s own design, the U 12 Flamingo biplane trainer, which BFW put back into production and sold to Austria, Hungary and Latvia.

Enter the young man from Bamberg

The name had a history of its own. An earlier Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, founded in Munich in 1916 from Gustav Otto’s aircraft works, had grown to 3,000 workers building Albatros types under licence before it was folded into BMW. The Augsburg company of 1926 was a different business that merely revived the name. What made it matter was a young designer from Bamberg, Willy Messerschmitt, whose small firm could not cope with an order for twelve M 18 airliners from the regional airline NOBA. In 1927 the two companies came together, and Messerschmitt became chief designer, with a financial group around the Bamberg tobacco family Michel-Raulino behind him.

The M 20 and a lifelong enemy

Then came the M 20, a ten-seat all-metal airliner for Luft Hansa. On its maiden flight on 26 February 1928 the covering tore from part of a wing; the pilot, Hans Hackmack, bailed out too low and was killed. Hackmack was a close friend of Erhard Milch, the head of Luft Hansa, and Messerschmitt’s cool response turned Milch into a lifelong enemy. After further M 20 crashes, Luft Hansa withdrew its order and, according to German sources, refused to pay for machines already delivered. With the Depression biting, BFW went bankrupt in June 1931.

Bankrupt, rescued, reborn

Messerschmitt saved a core of staff in a small firm of his own, financed partly by selling a licence for the M 23 sports plane to Romania. The M 23 had won the 1929 Circuit of Europe and won it again in 1930. BFW was restarted in 1933 as German rearmament began, and the Air Ministry’s order for an entry in the 1934 Challenge International de Tourisme produced the Bf 108, a four-seat tourer with all-metal stressed skin, nicknamed Taifun by the aviator Elly Beinhorn. Its construction led straight to a fighter: the Bf 109, which flew at Augsburg-Haunstetten in 1935, ironically with a British Rolls-Royce Kestrel engine, and won the Luftwaffe’s fighter competition.

Bf: the initials that outlived the company

Milch blocked Messerschmitt from owning the company until 1938, which is why his designs of the period carry the prefix Bf for Bayerische Flugzeugwerke. On 11 November 1937 a modified Bf 109 set a world speed record for landplanes of 610.95 km/h. On 11 July 1938 BFW became Messerschmitt AG, with Willy Messerschmitt as chairman. Existing types kept the Bf prefix, so the most-produced fighter in history, some 34,000 strong, still bears the initials of a company that had already ceased to exist.

Factories

• Haunstetter Strasse works · Augsburg-Haunstetten, Bavaria — Former Bayerische Rumpler-Werke halls and airfield, acquired 1926; birthplace of the Bf 109
• Bayerische Flugzeugwerke Regensburg GmbH · Regensburg, Bavaria — Subsidiary founded 24 July 1936; took over Bf 108 production

People

• Willy Messerschmitt · chief designer from 1927, chairman from 1938
• Ernst Udet · founder of the predecessor Udet Flugzeugbau
• Theo Croneiss · founder of the airline NOBA, ally of Messerschmitt
• Lilly Stromeyer · financier, born Freiin von Michel-Raulino — Guaranteed Messerschmitt’s ventures; later his wife
• Hans Hackmack · test pilot — Killed on the M 20’s maiden flight, 1928
• Erhard Milch · head of Luft Hansa, later state secretary for aviation — Cancelled BFW’s contracts after the M 20 crashes

Records and firsts

• Bf 109 V13 set a world speed record for landplanes of 610.95 km/h, 11 November 1937
• Bf 108 set an altitude class record of 9,075 m, July 1939
• M 23 won the Circuit of Europe in 1929 and 1930