A factory on the Wiener Neustadt field

The Oesterreichische Flugzeugfabrik AG, Oeffag for short, was set up in 1915 on the airfield at Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, on the site of an earlier aircraft-sales company backed by the financier Camillo Castiglioni. Its share capital of 600,000 crowns came from Austro-Daimler, then run by Karl von Škoda, and the Creditanstalt bank. It began building two-seat reconnaissance biplanes of its own design for the Imperial and Royal Army, and from 1916 seaplanes for the Navy, all powered by Austro-Daimler engines.

The better Albatros

Oeffag’s great product was a licensed German fighter. In autumn 1916 it obtained the rights to the Albatros D.III, and deliveries began in May 1917. The German original had a dangerous habit of lower-wing failure; Oeffag’s engineers thickened the ribs and spar flanges and largely cured it, while more powerful Austro-Daimler engines gave better performance. The result was popular, robust and effective, and Oeffag built about 526 of them, or 586 by some counts, by the Armistice. German wind-tunnel tests even found that its simple rounded nose, adopted in place of a spinner that kept falling off, improved propeller efficiency and added 14 km/h of top speed.

From fighters to car bodies

After the war, Poland bought 38 Oeffag D.IIIs from the factory and flew them against the Red Army in 1919–20, sending a letter of commendation to Wiener Neustadt. But the Treaty of Saint-Germain banned Austrian aircraft production, and Oeffag turned to building car and bus bodies for Austro-Daimler. In 1928 it merged with Austro-Daimler and Puch into Austro-Daimler-Puchwerke AG, later part of Steyr-Daimler-Puch. The old Oeffag buildings were taken over in 1935 by an airport company, from which the Wiener Neustädter Flugzeugwerke emerged in 1938, so aircraft returned to the site within a generation.

מפעלים

• Wiener Neustadt works · Wiener Neustadt airfield, Lower Austria — Later the site of the Wiener Neustädter Flugzeugwerke

אֲנָשִׁים

• Theo Weichmann · designer
• Josef Mickl · designer
• Karl von Škoda · head of Austro-Daimler, principal shareholder
• Camillo Castiglioni · financier of the predecessor Motor-Luftfahrzeug-GmbH

שיאים וראשונות

• Oeffag-built Albatros D.IIIs largely cured the lower-wing failures of the German original