The day the Duck fell

On 29 September 1927, over Bremen, Georg Wulf was showing off the strangest aircraft his young company had yet built. The F 19 Ente — the Duck — flew tail-first, with a small foreplane meant to stall before the main wing and make the machine almost impossible to spin. Wulf was demonstrating that it could fly on one engine when a control rod broke in mid-air. The Duck went down and Wulf, co-founder and chief test pilot, was killed. Focke-Wulf was not yet four years old.

Two friends from Hanover

The company had grown out of a friendship. Henrich Focke and Georg Wulf met as students in Hanover in 1911 and spent the next decade building aeroplanes together. On 24 October 1923 Bremen merchants backed them in a new firm, Bremer Flugzeugbau AG, renamed Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau AG on 1 January 1924. Werner Naumann ran the business; the coffee magnate Ludwig Roselius, whose Kaffee HAG combine held a large stake, became chairman and the company’s driving force. Wulf flew its first product, the small A 16 airliner, on 23 June 1924.

The Albatros dowry

In 1931 the government pushed Focke-Wulf into a merger with the insolvent Berlin firm Albatros, the great fighter builder of the First World War. The dowry was a young engineer called Kurt Tank, who arrived in November 1931 as head of design and flight testing. The hits came quickly: the Fw 44 Stieglitz trainer of 1932, built in Germany and under licence from Argentina to Sweden, and the Fw 56 Stösser. Ernst Udet fitted makeshift bomb racks to a Stösser to try dive-bombing — trials that helped lead to the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka.

A helicopter in a sports hall

Focke himself was more interested in rotors. His Fw 61 first flew on 26 June 1936 with Ewald Rohlfs at the controls and is widely regarded as the first fully controllable helicopter. In February 1938 Hanna Reitsch flew it indoors, inside Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle. By then its creator had gone: in 1936 shareholders forced Focke out, officially as politically unreliable, and control passed briefly to AEG. On 27 April 1937 he founded Focke-Achgelis with the pilot Gerd Achgelis to carry on with helicopters.

Berlin to New York, non-stop

Tank’s showpiece was the Fw 200 Condor, a four-engine airliner that first flew on 27 July 1937. On 10–11 August 1938 a Condor flew non-stop from Berlin-Staaken to Floyd Bennett Field in New York in 24 hours and 56 minutes, then came home in under 20. Months later the same aircraft set off for Tokyo. War turned the elegant airliner into a long-range maritime patrol bomber preying on Allied convoys, and Winston Churchill came to call it the scourge of the Atlantic. Another Condor served as Hitler’s personal transport.

The Shrike

The aircraft that made the name immortal first flew on 1 June 1939. Tank’s Fw 190 Würger — the Shrike — was rugged, fast and wide-tracked, and by 1941 it was outclassing the Spitfire V. Production, spread across Focke-Wulf plants and subcontractors such as AGO and Fieseler, reached about 23,800 including the high-altitude Ta 152. In June 1942 a lost German pilot, Armin Faber, landed his Fw 190 at a British airfield and handed the RAF an intact example. Not every Tank design worked: the wooden Ta 154 night fighter died when the only factory making its glue was bombed.

Scattered to the winds

After 1945 the company’s talent scattered. Tank went to Argentina, where he designed the Pulqui II jet, and then to India, where he created the HF-24 Marut, the first military aircraft built in that country. Focke went to Brazil. In Bremen, Focke-Wulf restarted with gliders in 1951 and powered aircraft in 1955, building 190 Piaggio P.149D trainers under licence for the new Luftwaffe. In 1964 it merged with its Bremen neighbour Weser Flugzeugbau to form Vereinigte Flugtechnische Werke, which in turn disappeared into MBB in 1981.

Továrny

• Bremen works · Bremen — Headquarters and main plant from 1923
• Bordeaux-Mérignac · Occupied France — Wartime production of the Fw 189
• Aero Vodochody, Prague · Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — Wartime Fw 189 production

Lidé

• Henrich Focke · co-founder, designer — 1890–1979; forced out in 1936, founded Focke-Achgelis in 1937
• Georg Wulf · co-founder, test pilot — Killed testing the F 19 Ente on 29 September 1927
• Kurt Tank · technical director, designer — 1898–1983; joined 1931; designed the Fw 190 and Fw 200; later the Pulqui II and HF-24 Marut
• Ludwig Roselius · chairman from 1925 — Kaffee HAG founder and the company’s main backer; died 1943
• Hanna Reitsch · test pilot — Flew the Fw 61 inside the Deutschlandhalle, February 1938

Rekordy a prvenství

• Fw 61: widely regarded as the first fully controllable helicopter, 1936 (f5)
• Fw 61: helicopter altitude of 3,427 m and 230 km straight-line distance, 1938 (f5)
• Fw 200 Condor: first non-stop Berlin–New York flight, 10–11 August 1938, 24 h 56 min (f4)