Table Of ContentFLYING
MAN
Number Twenty | Centennial of Flight | Roger D. Launius, General Editor
Professor Hugo Junkers in 1922. Technikmuseum Hugo Junkers, Dessau, 2013.
(From author’s collection)
FLYING
MAN
Hugo Junkers and the Dream of Aviation
Richard Byers
Texas A&M University Press
College Station
Copyright © 2016 by Richard Byers
All rights reserved
First edition
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Binding materials have been chosen for durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Byers, Richard, 1971– author.
Title: Flying man : Hugo Junkers and the dream of aviation / Richard Byers.
Other titles: Centennial of flight series ; no. 20.
Description: First edition. | College Station : Texas A&M University Press,
[2016] | Series: Centennial of flight ; number twenty | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024063| ISBN 9781623494643 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781623494650 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Junkers, Hugo, 1859–1935. | Junkers Flugzeug- und
-Motorenwerke AG—History. | Junkers-Flugzeugwerk AG—History. | Junkers
Motorenbau GmbH—History. | Aeronautical engineers—Germany—Biography. |
Junkers airplanes—History. | Aircraft industry—Germany—Dessau
(Dessau)—History—20th century. | Germany—Politics and
government—1918–1933.
Classification: LCC TL540.J8 B94 2016 | DDC 338.7/62913334092 [B]—dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024063
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Dessau: The City in Green vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1
The War Years, 1914–1918 11
CHAPTER 2
The Russian Affair, 1918–1924 37
CHAPTER 3
Diverging Paths, 1921–1926 67
CHAPTER 4
On the Edge, 1927–1932 123
CHAPTER 5
Twilight and Eclipse, 1932–1935 165
NOTES 185
231
BIBLIOGRAPHY
235
INDEX
Gallery follows page 102.
PREFACE
Dessau: The City in Green
Dessau, Germany, known to locals as the “city in green,” lies
two hours south of Berlin by train. Travel to the city from the “old
West” means passing through the bones of the Cold War borderlands,
still distinctly obvious due to the architectural differences and the train
stations—spotlessly clean and modern in the “old West” but decrepit
and graffiti-covered in the “former East.” The city received a face-lift
after reunification, but remains as it has been for centuries—a quiet,
beautiful place. Dessau is also architecturally renowned, having been
home to many in the modernist Bauhaus movement in the 1920s.
Small enough to walk across in half a day, but large enough to act as
regional center in an otherwise rural region, it sports a mixture of Cold
War-era “Ostalgic” reminders, such as a Russian restaurant, and newer
additions including a post-reunification industrial park like the ones
found in most modern urban areas today, which encloses the former
Junkers corporate headquarters and airfield. On these grounds is the
hangar-sized Technikmuseum Hugo Junkers, a museum staffed by wel-
coming volunteers and former employees that celebrates the career and
achievements of Professor Hugo Junkers. The Museum displays several
rusting East German Air Force fighters and helicopters, as well as the
broken, skeletal traces of the Junkers Corporation’s research facilities,
vii
viii PREFACE
including a weathered portion of its concrete wind tunnel. Behind the
wind tunnel is an abandoned research building, its open windows and
damaged roof attesting to the decades since its last use. Hardly an aus-
picious backdrop, but it was here, one hundred years ago, that the es-
sential features of modern aviation first took shape.
Working with his design teams in Dessau, and later in Munich, Pro-
fessor Hugo Junkers (1859–1935) combined extensive knowledge of
aerodynamics, structural engineering, and combustion engine design to
produce the Junkers J-1, the world’s first all-metal airplane, which flew
in April 1915. By 1917, his later designs were in service for Germany’s air
force, flying close support and ground-attack missions over the western
front trenches. Two years later in 1919, with the war over and Allied
bans on military production in place, Junkers’s ambitions produced
arguably his most important aircraft: the F-13, a luxury passenger and
freight carrier with a fully enclosed cabin that also possessed cutting-
edge performance and rugged durability. The F-13 went on to lead the
way across much of the global air route network over the next decade.
As his F-13 fleet crisscrossed the globe, Junkers created even more amaz-
ing designs, such as the Ju-52 transport plane, which carried German
soldiers and equipment during World War II and still flies today, and
futuristic concepts like the R-1 and J-1000, massive multie ngine, multi-
level aircraft designed to carry hundreds of passengers across the world’s
largest oceans—the intellectual and spiritual ancestors of today’s long-
haul passenger and freight carriers.
Today, Hugo Junkers is a member of the International Aerospace
Hall of Fame in San Diego, and not much else; beyond Dessau and his
adopted state of Sachsen-Anhalt, where he was recognized as a local
hero alongside Johann Sebastian Bach and other famous sons during
the 800th anniversary celebrations in 2012, he remains outside wider
public consciousness. Virtually none of the tens of millions of air pas-
sengers that travel every year know his story. Yet it was his dream, the
dream of a global, interconnected network of fast, safe, and reliable air
travel that has been realized in the twenty-first century. Although he saw
his achievements through the bifocal lenses of business opportunities
and technological innovation, like many of his industry contemporaries
he also held higher, almost messianic aspirations for his aircraft. Part
PREFACE ix
Thomas Edison, part Richard Branson, Hugo Junkers envisaged afford-
able, open-sky air travel as both a key component of global prosperity
and human progress, and also a means of conquering distance and open-
ing up opportunities for greater interaction and collaboration between
cultures and societies—a benevolent deus ex machina. A century after
the first short flight of the Junkers J-1, his vision has been realized, and
we are all the better for it. It is time his story was told and his achieve-
ments recognized outside Dessau, and this account represents a small
part of his far larger legacy.
