Aircraft makers

Halls without aircraft

In January 1952 Fritz Fend, an aeronautical engineer from Rosenheim with a design for a small car and no capital to build it, called at Messerschmitt’s idle Regensburg works. Willy Messerschmitt agreed to build a car, but only one with two seats, and from that bargain came the Messerschmitt KR175, unveiled at the Geneva show in spring 1953, and then the Messerschmitt KR200, three-wheeled cabin scooters of the kind Britain called bubble cars.source 1

The story is usually told in one sentence: the aircraft makers were banned from building aircraft, so they built cars. There was a ban, and it was written plainly.

In order to eliminate Germany’s war potential, the production of arms, ammunition and implements of war as well as all types of aircraft and sea-going ships shall be prohibited and prevented.

Japan had its own ban from September 1945. Set against the dates, though, the sentence fits one German works well and two others loosely, and most of the aircraft industry’s small cars not at all. They were built in countries that never had a ban, or years after it had ended, and many of them came not from aircraft firms but from aircraft engineers.

Japan’s ban was SCAP Directive No. 3 of 22 September 1945, which put every type of aircraft, those designed for civilian use included, and the parts made for them on its list of prohibited items.source 3 Nakajima Aircraft was forced to close.source 4 Kawasaki’s history dates the return of aircraft manufacturing to 1952, once the peace treaty with Japan had come into force.source 5

In West Germany the occupation statute ended when the Paris Treaties came into force on 5 May 1955.source 6 Aircraft work came back with rearmament. Messerschmitt formed Flugzeug-Union Süd in 1956 to build the Fouga Magister trainer;source 7 Dornier’s Do 27 first flew on 17 October 1956 and became the first German powered aircraft built in series after the war;source 8 Heinkel took up aircraft development again at Speyer in 1958.source 9 Nor had every firm simply waited. Dornier’s design office in Madrid, founded in 1951, drew the Do 25 for a Spanish requirement, and it first flew on 25 June 1954, built by CASA.source 8

There had been earlier limits, and the story fits them better. After 1918 the Treaty of Versailles restricted German aviation. BMW, a builder of aero engines, was pushed into motorcycles and truck engines, and it came to cars in 1928 by buying the works at Eisenach, which was building the Austin Seven under licence as the Dixi: that car became the BMW 3/15.source 10source 11 Rudolf Slaby, an aircraft engineer, had to change field after Versailles, and in 1919 he and his cousin Hermann Beringer founded a Berlin firm to build small electric cars, the Slaby-Beringer.source 12

Fend had trained in aeronautics at Munich’s Technische Hochschule, and in the war he tested and developed aircraft.source 13 The Messerschmitt Owners’ Club says Fend never worked for Messerschmitt, at that time or afterwards; the Weiner museum calls him Messerschmitt’s former employee.source 14source 15 After the war his own small firm in Rosenheim built the Fend Flitzer, a single-seat three-wheeler for the war-disabled (more on invalid carriages). The war-disabled association, the VdK, helped him get materials through the Americans, and the Flitzer counted as a mobility aid, which let him slip past some of the occupiers’ limits on vehicle building.source 16 It was not built in the Messerschmitt factory.source 17 Its last series had a 98 cc Riedel engine which, by Bill Cawthon’s account, derived from the starter motor fitted to the Me 262’s jet engines; no second source has been found for it.source 16

The Rosenheim workshop soon reached its limit. Fend’s agreement of 1952 was with Regensburger Stahl- und Metallbau, the Messerschmitt company at the old aircraft works, which needed products while aircraft building was forbidden.source 13source 16 The first Fend vehicle built there was a load-carrying three-wheeler, the Lastenroller, in 1952,source 14 and the cars that followed were Fend’s designs, built under licence from him.source 14 By February 1955 about 11,000 Kabinenroller had found buyers, well ahead of every other German cabin scooter,source 18 and almost 12,000 KR200s were built in 1955 alone, the best year any Kabinenroller had.source 1source 19 In the spring of 1956 Willy Messerschmitt told a Nuremberg paper that Regensburg was for vehicles for good.

Es war von jeher mein fester Entschluss, neben dem Flugzeugbau auch Fahrzeuge zu entwickeln. So ist das Werk Regensburg ausschließlich für den Fahrzeugbau eingerichtet worden und wird auch in Zukunft diesem allein vorbehalten bleiben.

Within months the firm was out. Able to build aircraft again, Messerschmitt lost interest in the car; on 29 November 1956 dealers were told that production would cease.source 1source 20 On 17 January 1957 a new firm owned by Fend and Valentin Knott, FMR (Fahrzeug- und Maschinenbau GmbH Regensburg), was announced to restart it; German Wikipedia dates FMR from 15 January.source 20source 1 Because Messerschmitt now held aircraft work, its name could not appear in the type name of FMR’s four-wheeler, which is why it was the FMR Tg500.source 1 An auction catalogue of 2021 says that the German government bought Messerschmitt’s car business; FMR was in fact a private company of Fend and Knott.source 21source 1source 20 Of all the aircraft industry’s small cars, this is the one the ban explains: an idle aircraft works took on a car to fill its halls, and let it go when aircraft came back.

In 1955 Werner Oswald of auto motor und sport counted Dornier third among the well-known aircraft firms, after Messerschmitt and Heinkel, in taking up the Rollermobil, the cabin scooter.source 22 Neither of the other two fits the ban as neatly as Messerschmitt. Ernst Heinkel’s firm had been making the Tourist scooter for years, and engines for others: Maico and Tempo used them.source 23source 24 A photograph of its cabin car’s prototype appeared early in 1955, and the Heinkel Kabine was built from December 1955 to June 1958, 11,975 of them: months after sovereignty, not during the ban.source 25source 26source 27 It took the Tourist scooter’s whole power unit, engine, gearbox and swinging arm, with hardly a change; when Paul Simsa tested it in 1956 its cabin strongly reminded him of an aircraft.source 28

Ernst Heinkel died in January 1958, days after his 70th birthday,source 23source 29 and by March Dundalk Engineering in Ireland had bought the rights, with Heinkel still supplying the engines.source 30 The Weiner museum and RM tie the sale to his death and to the resumption of aircraft production, and the museum adds that the car was losing money and that the scooter and engine work needed the space.source 23source 31 The magazine drew its own lesson.

Die Tatsache, daß eine Firma, die nicht davon leben muß, aus dem Kleinwagenbau aussteigt, sollte zu denken geben.

The design lived on in Ireland and then in Croydon as the Trojan 200.source 26 Dornier never put its car into production. Its Dornier Delta of 1955 seated four back to back, with a door at each end, and with both doors raised it looked, Oswald thought, like a helicopter. Dornier told him it would decide on making the car itself only once it knew whether aircraft building would resume, and that licence production elsewhere was possible.source 22 The Delta was shown at the Frankfurt show that September;source 32 a few weeks before, on 26 August 1955, a second Do 25 had been put on show at Dornier’s Oberpfaffenhofen works.source 8 The motorcycle maker Zündapp, in trouble as buyers deserted motorcycles, took the licence and reworked the design, built 6,902 Zündapp Janus in 1957 and 1958, and then sold its Nuremberg works to Bosch.source 33source 34source 35 An aircraft firm’s design, built by a motorcycle firm, is a long way from the story of idle hangars.

France, Britain, Poland and Czechoslovakia had no such ban, and their aircraft firms built small cars for other reasons. The French case is the cleanest test. The Inter 175 A Berline was designed and sold by AEMS of Saint-Ouen and built in Lyon by the nationalised aircraft maker SNCAN, which later became part of Aérospatiale; it was shown at the Paris show in the autumn of 1953.source 36source 37source 38 It wore its origins. Early cars had front wheels that folded under the body narrowing it from 1.35 m (53 in) to roughly 0.9 m (35 in), and it was started by a Westinghouse Gyrostarter, a helicopter-type inertia starter.source 36source 39source 38

The steering bar with its vertical grips, was even more aircraft-like than the Messerschmitt, as was the pointed ‘fuselage’.

About 300 were built by most accounts; Linz and Schrader’s encyclopedia gives about 100.source 37source 40 The same Gyrostarter turned up on the P. Vallée Chantecler.source 41

By 1907 Gabriel Voisin had built a practical aeroplane, and his firm became the first mass producer of aircraft, but he had left aviation for cars after 1918.source 42source 43 In 1949 he offered SNECMA, the nationalised group that had absorbed both his old firm and Gnome et Rhône, a microcar with a Gnome et Rhône 125 cc engine. About 15 or 16 of the Voisin Biscooter were built that summer, but SNECMA judged it to have no future, and although it drew more than 1,000 orders at the Paris show of 1950, SNECMA would not build it.source 44source 43source 42 Its obstacle was a nationalised board, not an Allied rule, and the design went to Autonacional of Barcelona, which launched the Biscúter in 1953.source 45 Other French small cars simply moved into aircraft buildings. Piaggio’s French company ACMA took over a former SNCAC aircraft factory at Fourchambault to make scooters from March 1951, and later built the Vespa 400 there;source 46 Société Air Tourist, the French agent for Cessna aircraft, assembled the Avolette in a hangar on the old military airfield at Toussus-le-Noble.source 47source 48

In Britain, Short Brothers & Harland assembled the Nobel 200, a Fuldamobil reworked for Britain, in Northern Ireland, and the Bristol Aeroplane Company moulded its glass-fibre bodies.source 49source 50 At the Paris show of 1958 the racing driver Mike Hawthorn was named Technical Director of York Noble Industries, the firm behind it.source 49

Call me the outfit’s tea-boy.

Cost overruns, a dispute with Bristol over the price of the bodies and a strike at Shorts ended production in Northern Ireland. Chassis numbers suggest that only some 400 existed by January 1960; Beaulieu and RM give about 1,000 in all.source 49source 50source 51 At Prestwick, Scottish Aviation, builder of the Twin Pioneer and, later, the Bulldog, took the idea for an electric car from the airport’s battery baggage tugs.source 52source 53 Its Project Department, under Dr W. Gordon Watson, built 13 of the Scottish Aviation Scamp, a prototype and 12 pre-production cars. MIRA’s tests of 1967 and 1968 were damning, the Electricity Council withdrew, and the project ended in 1968.source 53

In Poland the state used spare capacity. At the end of 1956 the authorities decided to make a car at two aviation works: WSK Rzeszów drew the engine, and WSK Mielec built the chassis and body of the Mikrus MR-300. Wikipedia gives 1,728 built between 1957 and 1960, a figure not yet confirmed from a primary source.source 54source 55 In Prague the aircraft maker Aero began building cars at Vysočany in 1929, a decade before the war, with the Aero 10, of which about 1,360 were made; it went on making cars until 1951.source 56source 57 In Hungary the ministry put its microcar programme into the engine-repair works at Székesfehérvár, a former aircraft-repair works used to aluminium, with two men who had designed aircraft, Pál Kerekes and Ernő Rubik Sr., whose son would invent the Rubik’s Cube. The Alba Regia and Balaton prototypes, ready by early 1956, ran on aircraft tail-wheels, and Rubik sprang the Balaton on rubber blocks, as he had sprung the landing gear of his gliders.source 58source 59

In Japan the ban did shape what came after it, but the cars came late. Nakajima’s successor, Fuji Sangyō, turned to the Rabbit scooter from 1946 and from 1947 to building bus bodies at Isesaki. The occupation split it into 12 companies, and in 1953 five of them came together again as Fuji Heavy Industries,source 60 which was building aircraft again by the middle of the decade.source 4 Its Subaru 360, a four-seater inside the kei car rules, was launched on 3 March 1958, six years after the ban was lifted, and about 392,000 were built by 1970.source 60source 61source 62source 63 Its project leader, Shinroku Momose, had joined Nakajima in January 1942 and worked on supercharging the Homare aero engine, and he and his team treated the car like an airframe;source 64source 60source 65 Momose went on to lead the Subaru Sambar, the van that followed it.source 66 The 360 came from aviation skills and a deliberate car programme, a decade after the scooters, not from an idle works.

Mitsubishi’s Nagoya works, too, had turned to civilian products when aircraft building was banned.source 67 Its Mitsubishi 500 of 1960 was designed by men who had been aircraft designers during the war, and a one-fifth-scale model of it went into what Mitsubishi and the Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan call the first wind-tunnel test of a Japanese car.source 68source 67source 69 It was built in answer to the trade ministry’s people’s-car plan of 1955, not to the ban, and it sold poorly: 13,289 were made.source 67

One Japanese car is often filed here by mistake. The Weiner museum tied the Fuji Cabin to an aircraft firm forbidden to build aeroplanes, but Japanese sources describe its maker, Fuji Jidōsha, as a rebuilder of military vehicles and a maker of engines, unconnected with Fuji Heavy Industries.source 70source 71

The truer version of the story is about people (more on the designers). The Iso Isetta was designed for the refrigerator and scooter maker Renzo Rivolta by two aircraft engineers, Ermenegildo Preti and Pierluigi Raggi. Preti was a designer of gliders and light aeroplanes at Milan’s Politecnico, and Italian Wikipedia traces the Isetta’s opening front to the hinged nose of his wartime AL.12 glider.source 72source 73source 74 In the war Lawrie Bond had designed for Blackburn Aircraft, before he drew the Bond Minicar.source 75 Air Vice-Marshal Don Bennett, who had commanded the RAF’s Pathfinder Force, founded Fairthorpe, whose first car was the Fairthorpe Atom; in 1954 its associate company was Dart Aircraft.source 76source 77 Paul Kleinschnittger, just after the war, gathered material by stripping wrecked military aircraft, and the Weiner museum says that his Kleinschnittger F125 was partly built from scrapped aircraft and army vehicles.source 78source 79

In San Diego the men came from Convair. The Bobbi-Kar was designed by John Liefeld, who had worked for Chrysler and then spent the war years at Convair,source 80source 81 and the Airway was the work of T. P. Hall, Convair’s chief development engineer and a builder of flying cars.source 82source 83 In Ohio the founders of the King Midget, Claud Dry and Dale Orcutt, had met in the wartime Civil Air Patrol.source 84 The habit is older than the bubble cars. Marcel Leyat, who designed some 30 aircraft, drove his Leyat Hélica with a propeller,source 85 and after 1918 the Air Navigation and Engineering Company built the Blériot-Whippet cyclecar in the former Blériot aircraft factory at Addlestone (more on the British cyclecars).source 86source 87

Others supplied the aircraft industry. The glass-fibre bodies of the Allard Clipper came from Hordern-Richmond, an aircraft-propeller firm at Thame airfield;source 88source 89 S. E. Opperman, which made aircraft components, built the Opperman Unicar;source 90source 91 ALCA of Milan, maker of the ALCA Volpe, had made nacelles for aero engines in the war;source 92 and Volugrafo of Turin, one of the Italian post-war minicars makers, made aircraft parts as well as its Bimbo.source 93source 94 In Japan, Ohta came under Tachikawa Aircraft in 1937 for war production, and its cars ended in 1940.source 95source 96

So the line about the ban is half true. It fits Messerschmitt’s Regensburg works from 1952 to 1956, and the first post-war products of Japan’s aircraft firms, which were scooters and bus bodies rather than cars. It fits the Heinkel and the Dornier only loosely, since both appeared as the ban was ending, and it does not fit France, Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia or the Subaru 360 at all. What the aircraft industry gave the microcar was less its empty halls than its engineers, and the cars show it still: a canopy hinged like a cockpit’s, two seats in tandem, a handlebar where the wheel should be.