Anthony Fokker

Biography

Fokker began his flying at Haarlem on 31 August 1911, the birthday of Queen Wilhelmina, and the next day he flew around the tower of St Bavo’s Church. He was twenty-one, the aeroplane was called the “Spin” (“the Spider”), and he had built it himself.

Anton Herman Gerard Fokker was born on 6 April 1890 in Blitar, on Java, in the Dutch East Indies; some sources give Kediri as his birthplace, the administrative centre of the residency to which Blitar belonged. His father, Herman Fokker, owned a coffee plantation. When the boy was four the family returned to the Netherlands and settled in Haarlem. He did not finish school: he was absorbed by model trains, steam engines and model aeroplanes.

In 1910 his father sent him to Germany to study automobile engineering at Bingen, but Fokker was drawn to flying, and he moved to a course at Mainz where an aeroplane was being built. His first machine, the “Spin”, was wrecked: by one account, a partner flew it into a tree. Fokker gained his pilot’s licence in 1911 in the second “Spider”. In 1912 he settled at Johannisthal near Berlin and founded the company Fokker Aeroplanbau. Orders were small, and money often ran out. In 1913 production moved to Schwerin. When the war began, orders poured in: army and navy officers bought up every aeroplane and engine in stock. In 1915 Fokker received German citizenship, although he later wrote that he had been forced into it. His staff grew from about a hundred to six thousand.

In May 1915 a synchronisation gear appeared that allowed a machine gun to fire through the arc of the propeller. It is usually credited to Fokker personally, and the story that he devised it in forty-eight hours after the capture of Roland Garros’s aeroplane is not borne out: the mechanism was apparently in development at his company for about six months, and staff of the armament department, among them Heinrich Lübbe, worked on the details. A patent for a similar device was held by Franz Schneider; after the war he won a lawsuit against Fokker but never received the money. The Eindecker fighters with this mechanism gave German pilots about six months of superiority, which the Allies called the “Fokker Scourge”. The first synchronisers often failed.

Not all the firm’s famous machines were conceived by Fokker himself. From 1916 the chief designer was Reinhold Platz, and the prototype of the future D.VII was largely his work; testing and refinement remained with Fokker. The D.VII was regarded as the best fighter of the last months of the war, and the terms of the Armistice named it separately among the aircraft to be handed over. To my mind, the dispute over who was the principal author has never been settled: documents of the time call Fokker the designer, while later writers put Platz in the foreground.

By the Armistice of 1918, Fokker’s companies and the factories associated with them had produced about 7,600 aeroplanes (other publications give markedly lower figures). In 1919, before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, he moved about 220 aeroplanes, more than 400 engines and factory equipment across the border into the Netherlands: it took six goods trains. He regained Dutch citizenship at the same time, and on 21 July the Nederlandsche Vliegtuigenfabriek, from which the Fokker company grew, was established in Amsterdam. In its first ten years it built about 700 military and 170 transport aircraft; KLM became a major customer.

In 1920 Fokker first came to the United States, in 1922 he opened an office in New York, and in December 1923 he founded the Atlantic Aircraft Company. In a modified Fokker F-4 in May 1923 the American airmen John Macready and Oakley Kelly made the first non-stop flight across the continent. The three-engined F.VII took part in well-known long-distance flights: in a Fokker F.VIIa/3m, the “Josephine Ford”, Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett took off from Spitsbergen in 1926 and claimed to have reached the North Pole (the claim was later disputed); in 1928, in the “Southern Cross”, Charles Kingsford Smith and his crew made the first flight across the Pacific from California to Australia. In the second half of the 1920s Fokker aircraft accounted for about forty per cent of the world market in transport aircraft.

He never obtained American citizenship: he filed a declaration of intent in 1926 but in 1933 let it lapse.

In 1929 the American company passed under the control of General Motors, Fokker was left the post of director of engineering, and in 1931 he left. The firm had gone on too long building machines with a welded steel-tube fuselage and a wooden wing while its competitors moved to all-metal aircraft. In 1934 KLM ordered Douglas aircraft instead of new Fokkers, and Fokker became an agent for selling Douglas aircraft in Europe.

Anthony Fokker died on 23 December 1939 in New York. His ashes were taken to the Netherlands and in 1940 buried in the family grave at Westerveld Cemetery in Driehuis.