The Fw 190 entered squadron service with Jagdgeschwader 26 in the second half of 1941. In combat over northern France its advantages were immediate: a roll rate no contemporary Allied fighter could match, a strong dive, heavy cannon armament and excellent speed below about 6,000 m. RAF Fighter Command, which had held the initiative since 1940, suddenly found its Spitfire Mk Vs outclassed in most of the flight envelope.

The alarm was serious enough that Supermarine rushed the Spitfire Mk IX — essentially a Mk V airframe with a two-stage Merlin 61 — into service in 1942 largely to restore parity. The Allies got their first intact example of the new German fighter almost by accident in June 1942, when a disoriented pilot landed his Fw 190 A-3 at an RAF airfield in Wales. Test flights of that aircraft confirmed what the squadrons already knew: the Würger was a formidable opponent.

The BMW 801 radial was powerful but demanding, with many variables a pilot would normally juggle by hand — fuel mixture, supercharger gear, boost pressure, ignition timing and propeller pitch. Focke-Wulf’s solution was the Kommandogerät (“command device”), an early electro-hydraulic engine-control computer that read altitude and throttle position and set all of those parameters automatically. The pilot moved one lever; the unit did the rest. It cut cockpit workload dramatically and let a relatively new pilot get full performance from a complex engine — a genuinely advanced piece of engineering for the early 1940s.

The radial-engined Fw 190 was outstanding low down but faded at high altitude, where escorting American fighters increasingly operated. Rather than redesign the aircraft, Focke-Wulf fitted the liquid-cooled inline Junkers Jumo 213, its annular radiator disguising the change so the nose still looked almost radial. The resulting Fw 190 D-9 — the “Langnasen-Dora,” or long-nose Dora — reached service in 1944 and could top roughly 685 km/h. Kurt Tank then stretched the concept into the Ta 152, a high-altitude interceptor with long wings and a Jumo 213E, reportedly capable of around 755 km/h at height. Both were excellent, but only a few hundred Doras and a few dozen Ta 152s were completed before the war ended.

The Fw 190 was a wartime German state product, mass-produced across a dispersed network of factories and forced-labour plants under a command economy, and never sold on any open market. As a result there is no reliable flyaway unit price in the public record, and no meaningful cost-per-flight-hour figure — the type has no operator today. What is well documented is scale: around 20,000 airframes were built between 1941 and 1945, making the Würger one of the most-produced German fighters of the war alongside the Bf 109. Any precise money figure attached to an individual Fw 190 should be treated as an estimate.