An artillery workshop in Thun

The federal works at Thun began life in 1863 as the Eidgenössische Reparaturwerkstätte, a repair shop set up on the initiative of General Hans Herzog, the army’s inspector of artillery. In 1874 it became the Eidgenössische Konstruktionswerkstätte, the federal construction workshop, known by the initials K+W. For half a century its business was guns, carriages and military equipment. Aircraft arrived only with the First World War, when neutral Switzerland found it could no longer simply buy what it needed abroad.

Haefeli’s aeroplanes

The man who turned K+W into an aircraft maker was the engineer August Haefeli. His first design, the Häfeli DH-1, was delivered in April 1916, and it was followed by a family of two-seat reconnaissance biplanes: the DH-2, the long-serving DH-3 and DH-5 in several versions, and the Militär-Apparat series MA-6, MA-7 and MA-8. From 1925 K+W built French Dewoitine fighters under licence, including the D.26 and D.27, and from 1933 it shared production of the Fokker C.V-E with the Dornier works at Altenrhein.

Into RUAG

Military aircraft work left Thun for the new federal aircraft factory at Emmen between 1940 and 1943, and K+W went back to being an arsenal. In the mid-1990s it was renamed Schweizerische Unternehmung für Waffensysteme, in September 1998 it became a joint-stock company, and by 1999 it had been absorbed into the new RUAG group, where the old Thun works formed the core of RUAG Defence.

Factories

• Federal works, Thun · Thun, canton of Bern — Aircraft built here until production moved to Emmen, 1940–1943

People

• Hans Herzog · general, inspector of artillery — Initiated the workshop in 1863
• August Haefeli · aircraft designer — Designed the DH series from 1916