On 24 November 1955 a high-winged prototype registered PH-NIV took to the air for the first time. It had two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops, a pressurised cabin and an airframe in which much of the metal was glued together rather than riveted. According to the Fokker history archive, the flight lasted 34 minutes.

Fokker called it the Friendship. Over the next three decades the F27 became the most numerous post-war aircraft built in the Netherlands and the best-selling European turboprop airliner of its era, a record only later overtaken by the ATR 72. Counting the American-built versions, 787 were made.

Afterburner recently told the story of the Vickers Viscount, the world's first turboprop airliner and the aircraft that proved the Dart engine. The Friendship took that same engine, scaled the formula down for short regional hops, and sold it to the world. It came from a company still remembered for First World War fighters such as the Fokker D.VII.

A Dutch Answer to the DC-3

After the Second World War, short-haul flying belonged to the Douglas DC-3 and its military twin, the C-47 Skytrain. More than 10,000 had been built during the war, and surplus airframes were cheap and everywhere. By 1951 voices inside Fokker were urging a 32-seat airliner designed as a direct DC-3 replacement.

Fokker asked DC-3 operators what they wanted from a successor, then let chief designer Kees van Meerten and his team work through the options. Wright Cyclone radial engines were considered and rejected. The final layout, which began as design study P275, paired a high wing with two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops and a pressurised cabin for 28 passengers.

The high wing gave more lift, a low cabin floor for easy loading at small airports and an unobstructed view for every passenger. The Dart had already proven itself on the Viscount. In 1953 the project received its name, Friendship, and Dutch government funding helped pay for the prototypes.

Period footage of a test flight by the first Fokker F27 prototype, PH-NIV.

Glued, Not Riveted

The most radical thing about the F27 was invisible from the outside. Fokker used Redux, a metal-to-metal bonding process, for much of the airframe, becoming the first company after de Havilland to build an airliner this way. Bonded panels meant a longer fatigue life, smoother skins and a lighter structure.

The Aviodrome aviation museum in Lelystad, which keeps two Friendships in its collection, sums it up plainly.

Four prototypes were built. Two flew, while the other two were used for static and fatigue testing. Flight trials revealed that PH-NIV was slightly tail-heavy, so the second prototype, which first flew in January 1957, was stretched by about 0.9 metres. The fix also made room for four more passengers, raising capacity to 32.

Production aircraft grew again. The first production model, the F27-100, seated 44, and later variants used more powerful Darts. The F27-500, with a 1.5-metre longer fuselage and room for up to 52 passengers, flew in November 1967.

America Got There First

Fokker had been talking to the American manufacturer Fairchild since 1952, and in 1956 the two signed a licence deal. Fairchild would build the Friendship in the United States as the F-27. The first American-built aircraft flew on 12 April 1958.

Then came a twist. The first Friendship of either make to carry fare-paying passengers was a Fairchild F-27, which entered service with West Coast Airlines in September 1958, before any Dutch-built example. Fairchild's version had a basic layout for 40 seats, heavier skins, a longer nose able to hold weather radar, more fuel and a rear airstair door that saved airports from wheeling out steps.

Fairchild went further on its own. The FH-227 stretched the fuselage by 1.83 metres for 56 standard seats and appeared almost two years before Fokker's similar F27-500. Allegheny, Ozark, Piedmont, Mohawk and many other US regional carriers flew the Fairchild family. When American production ended in 1973, Fairchild had built 128 F-27s and 78 FH-227s.

Aer Lingus and the European Breakthrough

In Europe the honour went to Ireland. Aer Lingus took delivery of its first two F27-100s on 19 November 1958 and began flying them in December, replacing its DC-3s. The Irish airline already knew the Dart well, having been the third airline to introduce the Viscount. According to the Irish travel trade site Travel Extra, all seven of its Friendships were named after saints whose names began with F.

Other early buyers included Braathens SAFE in Norway, Luxair, Turkish Airlines, New Zealand's National Airways Corporation and Australia's Trans Australia Airlines, Ansett and East-West Airlines. Even so, early sales were slow, and Fokker had to lean on banks and the Dutch government to keep the production line running while it hunted for customers.

In 1960 the tide turned. Operators found the Friendship faster, quieter, more comfortable and more reliable than the piston airliners it replaced, and big orders followed. That year an F27 with RDa.6 Darts carried a base price of £239,000.

Ruairidh MacVeigh's documentary on the Fokker F27 and its successor, the Fokker 50.

Troopships and Sub-Hunters

The same airframe made a natural military workhorse. The F27-300M Troopship was built for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, with extra-large doors on both sides so paratroopers could jump. The Finnish Air Force used Friendships for transport, signals reconnaissance and parachute training.

The best-known military Friendships flew for the US Army. In December 1985 the Golden Knights parachute team leased two F27-400Ms from Fokker to replace their ageing YC-7A Caribou. The Army soon bought them outright as the C-31A Troopship, and they carried the team to its shows for more than three decades.

After the type was retired in 2019, the C-31A known as Excalibur flew to Lelystad in the Netherlands to join a Dutch flying heritage collection, bringing one Friendship home.

Fokker also turned the F27 into a maritime patrol aircraft. The unarmed F27 Maritime was built for offshore surveillance, search and rescue, pollution control and fishery inspection, while the Maritime Enforcer added underwing attachment points for bombs and rockets. The prototype was an ex-Turkish Airlines F27 that Fokker bought back and converted. Sales were fewer than hoped, at around 15 aircraft.

From F27 to Fokker 50

Part of the Friendship's appeal to small operators in remote places lay in its simple systems. Fokker chose a pneumatic system instead of hydraulics, a choice the Fokker history archive credits with making the F27 quick, easy and economical to maintain.

By the early 1980s, though, sales were sliding. In November 1983 Fokker decided to develop two new airliners at once: the Fokker 100 to replace the F28 Fellowship jet, and the Fokker 50 to replace the F27. Though derived from the F27-500, the Fokker 50 was virtually a new aircraft, with Pratt & Whitney Canada engines and modern systems that cut fuel burn by about 30 per cent.

It was a genuinely European airliner. Belgium's SABCA built the wings, Dassault supplied fuselage sections and Germany's MBB made the flaps. The Fokker 50 first flew on 28 December 1985 and entered service in 1987, the year the last F27s were produced. The Rolls-Royce Dart bowed out with them, after some 40 years and about 7,100 engines.

An Airwork Fokker F-27 lands and taxis at Blenheim, New Zealand, with the distinctive whine of its Rolls-Royce Dart engines.

A Dutch Design Icon

The Fokker 50 never matched its parent. Only 213 were completed before Fokker collapsed into bankruptcy in March 1996, squeezed by cost overruns and competition from the ATR 42, Saab 340 and Dash 8. The Friendship had long since paid its way.

In 2006 the Dutch public voted the F27 the best Dutch design of all time in a poll run by the Premsela design foundation and the newspaper NRC Handelsblad, ahead of a Rietveld chair, the Senseo coffee maker and the Maxi-Cosi baby seat.

Today a Friendship painted as PH-NIV stands guard at the entrance to the Fokker Logistics Park at Oude Meer, on the site of the old factory beside Schiphol. It is actually a later F27-500, but the paint is right. The Aviodrome in Lelystad keeps the third prototype and the first production aircraft. Like the Viscount before it, the F27 proved that turbine power belonged on short routes too, and Europe sold that idea to the world.

Sources: Wikipedia (Fokker F27 Friendship, Fairchild F-27, Fokker 50, Rolls-Royce Dart, Fokker F27 Dutch edition), fokker-history.com, Aviodrome, Airways Magazine, Vintage Aviation News, Aer Lingus media centre, Travel Extra, Army.mil, GlobalSecurity.org, dutch-aviation.nl, Septentrion (2006)