An Austrian financier buys a German factory

Hansa-Brandenburg was a German company with an Austrian heart. In 1914 the Taube pioneer Igo Etrich set up the Brandenburgische Flugzeugwerke at Briest, outside Brandenburg an der Havel, with Ernst Heinkel as chief designer. The financier Camillo Castiglioni, an Austrian with a talent for buying industries, took it over and merged it with the Hansa works of Carl Caspar in Hamburg. English sources date his purchase to May 1914, German ones to July 1915. By the autumn of 1915 it was, by one account, the largest aircraft manufacturer in Germany, with 1,000 employees and factories in Brandenburg, Berlin and Hamburg.

Heinkel at the drawing board

Heinkel, still in his twenties, ran the design office for the whole war, and his signature was the slab-sided plywood fuselage. Because Castiglioni also controlled aircraft firms in Austria-Hungary, many Hansa-Brandenburg designs were drawn in Germany for the Austro-Hungarian forces and built there under licence. The C.I two-seater of 1916 is the clearest example: Hansa-Brandenburg made 84, while Phönix in Vienna built 400 and Ufag in Budapest 834. It served from spring 1916 to the end of the war for reconnaissance, artillery spotting and light bombing.

The Spider and the Coffin

Not everything Heinkel drew was a success. The D.I fighter of 1916 braced its wings with an unusual star of struts, which earned it the nickname Spider. Its deep fuselage blanked the small rudder and made spins hard to recover from, which earned it a second nickname, the Coffin. Austria-Hungary still made it its standard fighter until mid-1917, and aces such as Godwin Brumowski and Frank Linke-Crawford flew it. In all 122 were built, 50 by Hansa-Brandenburg and 72 by Phönix.

Hornets of Zeebrugge

The seaplanes made the name. The W.12 two-seat floatplane fighter, delivered from 1917, defended German naval bases in Flanders, and on 11 December 1917 Friedrich Christiansen shot down the British airship C.27 in one. Heinkel claimed he sketched its monoplane successor on the back of a wine list while bored in a cabaret; Hanns Klemm did the detailed design. The W.29 reached Zeebrugge in 1918, and in June Christiansen’s flight shot down two Felixstowe flying boats and then machine-gunned the British submarine C25 on the surface, killing five of her crew.

A design that outlived its maker

Versailles ended aircraft building in 1919, although the company lingered on paper, with Castiglioni and Heinkel on its board, until at least 1925. The designs did not die with it. The Dutch navy built 35 W.12s as the Van Berkel W-A and flew them until 1934. Finland built 120 W.33s as the IVL A.22 Hansa, the first aircraft mass-produced in that country, Norway built its own as the Måke, and Aichi and Nakajima built several hundred Hansa-type seaplanes for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Heinkel went on to found his own company.

Заводы

• Brandenburg works · Briest, Brandenburg an der Havel — Original Brandenburgische Flugzeugwerke site
• Rummelsburg works · Rummelsburg, Berlin
• Hamburg works · Hamburg (Fuhlsbüttel and Wandsbek) — From the Hansa-Flugzeug-Werke of Carl Caspar; Max Oertz yacht yard added in 1918

Люди

• Camillo Castiglioni · owner, Austrian financier — Also controlled Austro-Hungarian aircraft firms that licence-built the designs
• Эрнст Хайнкель · chief designer and technical director — Designed the C.I, D.I, W.12 and W.29
• Igo Etrich · founder of the Brandenburgische Flugzeugwerke — Creator of the Etrich Taube
• Hanns Klemm · engineer — Detailed design of the W.29; designed the W.33
• Friedrich Christiansen · naval pilot, commander at Zeebrugge — Led W.12 and W.29 operations over the North Sea

Рекорды и первые достижения

• Largest aircraft manufacturer in Germany by autumn 1915, by English Wikipedia’s account
• W.12 shot down the British airship C.27, 11 December 1917
• IVL A.22 Hansa, the licence W.33, was the first aircraft mass-produced in Finland
• Licence C.I production at Cotroceni, 120 aircraft in 1922–1923, was the first large-scale aircraft production in Romania