Hamburger Flugzeugbau

Hamburger Flugzeugbau
Industry Aircraft building company
Fate Merged
Predecessor Blohm & Voss
Successor Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB)
Founded 1933 (1933)
Defunct 1969
Headquarters Hamburg, Germany

Hamburger Flugzeugbau was an aircraft company, located in the Finkenwerder quarter of Hamburg, Germany. The company was established in July 1933 as a subsidiary of the Blohm & Voss shipbuilders. It later became an operating division within its parent company. In the postwar period it has managed to survive under different names as part of different consortia, and participates in the present day Airbus and European aerospace program.

History

Establishment

In the early 1930s the Blohm & Voss shipbuilders in Hamburg were suffering from a lack of work and its owners, brothers Rudolf and Walter Blohm, decided to branch out into the related business of all-metal seaplane construction. Together with their brother-in-law Dipl-Ing Max Andreae and experienced aviator Robert Schröck, they founded Hamburger Flugzeugbau with the intent of building long-range passenger seaplanes for Deutsche Luft Hansa. It was at that time commonly believed that transatlantic air transport would soon take over the role filled by the luxury liners of that time. It was also thought that those planes would be seaplanes and flying boats as they could use the infrastructure and capacity of the seaports already in place, while land facilities at that time were unsuited to such large aeroplanes.[1]

Schröck persuaded the designer Herr Mewes away from Heinkel and, with four other designers, on 1 July they began work. Their first aircraft, the Ha 135, took off on its first fight on 28 April in the next year, 1934. But Mewes was unfamiliar with all-metal construction and had built it with a fabric covering.[1]

During this period the ruling Nazi party was massively increasing the interwar re-armament program which included the complete overhaul of the aircraft industry. In particular, the Nazis wanted the technical capacities to quickly build large numbers of warplanes for the new Luftwaffe. As a result, the company took on subcontract manufacture of Junkers Ju 52 subassemblies, thus gaining valuable experience in the manufacture of all-metal aircraft.

Richard Vogt

The Blohm & Voss BV 141, 1942

With Mewes now out of his depth, on the advice of the RLM, the company offered the job of chief designer to Richard Vogt, then in the same position at Kawasaki in Japan and experienced in all-metal construction. Vogt accepted, a new team was recruited and Mewes and his four colleagues left.[1]

A couple of years later, the Fieseler aircraft factory in Halle became an independent aircraft manufacturer under the name of Flugzeugbau Halle and by orders of the Reichsluftfahrtministerium, Hamburger Flugzeugbau was renamed Blohm & Voss Flugzeugbau and given the company designation BV, so the old designation Ha could now go to the new Halle factory.

Vogt's designs built before and during the war included:

Of these aircraft, only the BV 138 "Fliegende Holzschuh" (flying clog) attained serial production. All other aircraft either remained prototypes or were limited to a small number of preseries/purpose build machines. Nevertheless, work on the prototypes and series production of the BV 138 was sufficient to require a second manufacturing plant at Finkenwerde.

The largest aircraft ever designed and built by any of the Axis powers of World War II, the Blohm & Voss BV 238, resembled an enlarged BV 222, with only one prototype aircraft built and flown.

The German air industry was suspended at the end of World War II. Vogt and his team split up and several of them, including Vogt, found their way to America under Operation paperclip.

Postwar

The Hamburger Flugzeugbau re-emerged in 1956 as part of Flugzeugbau Nord and license built Nord Noratlas.

The HFB-320 Hansa Jet

In 1961, Focke-Wulf, Weserflug and Hamburger Flugzeugbau joined forces in the Entwicklungsring Nord (ERNO) to develop rockets.

In the mid 1960s Hamburger Flugzeugbau worked on a design for a twin-jet HFB 314 aimed at medium-haul market that the Caravelle was enjoying a success in. The design did not get off the drawing board with the company becoming involved in the production of the French-German Transall C-160 military transport. It also developed and built a private jet aircraft called the HFB-320 Hansa Jet which first flew in 1964. This aircraft did not bring in many orders either, but the company survived as subcontractor for various German – and increasingly European co-production – aircraft project.

In May 1969, Hamburger Flugzeugbau was acquired by Messerschmitt-Bölkow. The company then changed its name to Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB).

In the late 1970s, the company became involved in subcontracting for the new pan-European Airbus. In the 1980s, after much political games between Germany and France, it became Airbus' second final assembly wharf (after Toulouse) for the smaller models A310 and A320.

References

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Amtmann (1998)

Bibliography

External links

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