North American and the P-51, Origins
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2023
- Where did North American Aviation come from? The showed up out of nowhere and in very little time were able to turn out planes like the T6, P-51, and B-25. How was this possible?
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My answers to common questions and comments on this video.
Correction, Not Boston, Baltimore, for whatever reason I said Boston Logan but it was actually near the airport in Baltimore Maryland.
Pronunciation. I know the Dutch say Fokker differently. There is no way to please everybody on pronunciation. This is a world wide forum and we are all going to have to make do with other people's accents and pronunciation. Some of the names in this video are made with letters that don't even exist in English. With Fokker it's even more complex because the most common Dutch pronunciation would probably trigger some profanity problems with youtube. I know Fokker is a name and isn't profanity, by try arguing with the youtube demonetization bot.
Oklahoma is 23 times larger than Holland, however "only" slightly more than four times larger than The Netherlands.
Edgar Schmued was only at Bellanca for a few weeks. According to his biography "Mustang Designer". He went to Bellanca in Oct. of 1935. We don't have an exact date when he left, but we know he left soon to go back to North American in California. Tragically he was in an auto accident on the trip resulting in the death of his wife. This accident happened on Nov. 12th 1935. He was back at work at North American in Feb. of 1936. Thus he could not have been at Bellanca more that a few weeks at most certainly not months or years as some in the comments are claiming.
There have been quite a few commenters saying that Fokker was not the major contributing factor to the rapid success at North American. Let's look at the facts.
G.M. paid over 7.8 million 1929 dollars for their stake in Fokker. That's over 143 million in 2023 dollars. Fokker was the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world during much of the 1920's.
Some are saying that it was other companies that G.M. purchased that were the true drivers of North American. This is just nonsense. For example, one very vocal critic has brought up Berliner-Joyce, an airplane company bought by G.M. in 1933. It's just crazy to compare Berliner-Joyce to Fokker. Berliner-Joyce had only been building planes since 1928. They had only built a total of 75 planes by the time of the buyout in 1933 and none of those were multi-engine and only about seven of them were were monoplanes. That's SEVEN monoplanes planes total, NOT seven types of monoplanes. To try and argue that this was some large or advanced operation that rivaled Fokker in terms of it's contributions to North American is just plain silly.
The other argument seems to be centered around personnel. Yes, as I stated in the video North American hired people from the outside. I specifically mentioned that some came from Douglas, some from Martin. However the biggest single source of employees when North American Started were the Fokker employees who went with them. These include, just to name a few Edgar Schmued, who we talked about. Vance Breese the original P-51 test pilot and Richard Thaiss who was a sheet metal foreman foreman at North American and had started at Fokker in 1927.
Arguing that 1, 2 or even 6 people from Douglas or wherever had a bigger effect than all of Fokker seems a bit silly and I think it stems from elitism. If making that argument you're discounting the production value of the people on the shop floor who know how to actually turn those drawings and ideas into airplanes. These people were predominately from Fokker at the time the Inglewood plant got going.
Most of the other complaints I am getting on this video have to do with omissions, not anything that's incorrect or even debatable. The problem with complaining about an omission is that it's a criticism that can be leveled and any video ever made or book ever written, thus it's a pointless complaint and a waste of intellectual space. - Авто та транспорт
Please see the description before commenting on: Pronunciation, Boston, Bellanca, or your reason some other entity was the "real" driving force behind North American. It's likely that it's already addressed there.
The comment about Fokker was both hilarious and depressing. Curse you bad-word bot!
With Fokker in Teterboro, being the NYC area, it would have been good to mention the Dutch roots of America's largest city, originally called New Amsterdam. With the very colors, including the colors of the NY Mets coming from the Dutch flag.
Then at the end, it was capped off quite abruptly. We're talking about the aerospace company which flew the first human beings to the Moon. While in parallel, they flew the X-15, which led to the Space Shuttle. And then there were their majestic bombers which were descended from the B-25, culminating in the Mach 3 XB-70 Valkyrie, and the B-1 Bone.
Going back to what Anthony Fokker accomplished back during WWI, there one of his most famous inventions was figuring out a way to shoot machine guns without destroying your own propeller, the interrupter gear.
And I'm not sure why you opted to not mention Knute Rockne by name, the coach immortalized in the Ronald Reagan movie about winning one for the Gipper. The man who popularized the forward pass ironically dying while choosing to travel by air.
Great video. And in the future, we can expect a more comprehensive doc which covers these other huge accomplishments which were Anthony Fokker's legacy.
He was on the losing side of WWI. But with his if-you-can't-beat-em-join-em strategy, Fokker ended up on the winning side of WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. Victory all the way to the Moon. Apollo 8 reached the Moon... the Lunar Sphere of Influence, on the 29th anniversary of Anthony Fokker's death.
Fun fact of the day: Holland isn't actually the name of the Netherlands, it refers to 2 provinces IN the Netherlands which used to be a single province named Holland, now named Noord Holland and Zuid Holland.
I would be interested in seeing a video about the differences in airspeed, climb rate and range between a standard issue fighter and the same model / engine converted to photoreconnaissance. Did they tune the engine for better performance at certain expected altitudes at the expense of poorer performance at others? Was the difference enough to make catching them significantly difficult?
It’s great to meet the Fokkers
I don't believe I have ever before heard a UA-cam creator say "but that's a story for another video--which I don't plan on making."
Actually, I respect that.
I have been a Fokker Aircraft employee between August of 1977 and April 1996 in the Netherlands, and although I switched to IT after that, my heart is still in aviation. I thought I knew everything there is to know about Anthony Fokker, because there was a time that his history was more or less folklore over here, but I never heard of what Greg uncovers here. Great stuff, and I learned something this morning! Thank you!
Thanks, it's nice to hear from someone who was there. It was a sad day when Fokker ended production of the F100.
Greg never fails’ to deliver.
First big airplane was an F27. I have a special place in my heart for the ugly fokker
It’s just a game Fokker
@@ndenise3460'Ugly'? You cad! 😉
Not just a technical expert, but a master of narrative storytelling as well.
Brief as they are, every story has a delightful " to be continued" standard that keeps me coming back for more.
When reading NACA information, I hear it in Greg's voice. Haha !
Greg is easily the best on UA-cam for this type of content.
I think Greg makes the kind of videos HE would like to watch. THANK YOU GREG!
@@tomw9875he reminds me of some of the better teachers I had when I was in school.
Folker, Folker???? you've got to watch out for u toob "standards" I suppose
@@paulnutter1713 never attack someone for bad pronunciation because it means they learned it reading, something we should all do more of.
True, since there isn’t anyone else doing this type of content. His standards and level of detail push this into its own genre.
I love this channel so much because of how unafraid Greg is of getting SUPER pedantic and in-the-weeds with history. Thank you, sir.
Pedantic? More like knowledgeable I'd say...
@@Pikilloification I agree, but, personally, I have been called pedantic far too frequently for the infraction of being knowledgable to not brand it as a badge of honor. Therefore, I use it as that and recognize those I refer to in that manner as not being afraid to jump down rabbit holes of knowledge.
If you are making this distinction, I would imagine that you may have experienced the same.
I meant it as nothing but a badge of honor and recognition.
Sometimes pedantic works just fine!
The simple fact that he was able to get all those planes and a train load of equipment out of Germany is a amazing feat in and of itself! I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have cost him? But it really shows his ability for organizing and logistics and those two things are absolutely needed when running any kind of large business operation of any kind but especially aircraft manufacturing! Just look at Kelly Johnson he also was great at that!
I mention this tentatively because this era is not my area of expertise: but what makes Fokker's feat even more improbable is that immediate post-war Germany, infrastructure-wise, was significantly broken.
Anthony Fokker actually specified the amount of bribe money he had to pay to pull this off. I don't recall what it was but it sounded like a lot, and it was paid in Dutch money because German currency had collapsed.
@@donaldelfreth553 Yes that provides some difficulties, but the chaos probably made something like this possible in the first place, as well as being a situation where people are far more likely to take bribes and look the other way. Look the other way for a considerable amount of time judging by the kit transported!
@@donaldelfreth553, no. Germany in 1918 was starving but not destroyed. The war was fought to the end beyond its borders, which is a difficulty for many.
Fokker literally lived in von Richthofen's Flying Circus, and was a close friend of Goering, their new chief. The main difficulty: one had to flee quickly, as in time commissions came to Germany to return to the owners from Belgium and France their property stolen by the Germans. And at the same time destroyed the aviation. Aviation technologies nobody needed them, except the USA, where they wanted to get the other part of innovations, French, Italian, British already in the USA.
@@donaldelfreth553 Another difficulty, now little looked at: there were severe restrictions on the entry of Germans into the United States. How fortunate that Fokker is Dutch and Schmüd was born in Austria.
So interesting. Had no clue about the Fokker link to North American. I remember feeling sad in the 1990's when Fokker closed down (Fuselage was made in Shorts, N. Ireland), but to know that the core of the mans business was actually Stateside, and produced the holy grail, has cheered me up immensely.
The irony of the North American being a GM company who's product, The P-51 Mustang, was one of the inspirations for one of their competitors most successful lines of cars. The Ford Mustang.
Yes, Ford could take advantage of the fact that nobody really knew the Mustang as essentially a G.M. product.
In 1967 my family attended the EAA fly-in in Rockford, IL where we saw a North American P-64 perform acrobatic feats for the crowd. The plane had started life as a NA-68 built for the Royal Thai Air Force, but was instead transferred to the Army Air Corps and re-designated P-64, even though it was only used as an unarmed advanced trainer.
Well Fokk me! I never knew that.
I'm addicted to Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles 😊
I can quit watching Greg whenever I want!
@@rich7787 Yeah, I tell that to myself as well.😉
Greg for President of the USA, he would have the place flying like a breeze in a year.
Haha
So one of the chief scourges of Hitler's Luftwaffe was born from a seed planted by the man whose airplanes had been the hard core of the Kaiser's air force. That's irony for you.
Sir Charles Kingsford Smith the Australian Aviator used a Fokker Tri Motor when he flew across the Pacific.
Yes, and I think it was a good choice, probably the best possible choice at the time.
I wish this was a three hour video, so that every thing could be covered. Great job fitting a huge amount of information in just 30 minutes.
Thanks, it could have been. The Eddie Rickenbacker part of the saga and effects of the F10 crash alone could have added another hour.
Don't forget the North American NAVION for general Aviation. Looked a lot like the p-51, and was the best flying plane I ever flew. RYAN aircraft bought the Navion in 47/48 and continued to build it under the Ryan Brand .
Thanks for another great video! As a kid in the 50's and 60's, our dad was an industrial engineer working for Autonetics, a division on North American, in Anaheim, CA, which then got merged into Rockwell Corporation. Autonetics did navigation hardware for many projects, including the Minuteman missiles. I was in boot camp when we got word Rockwell's new fighter lost the competition with the Mc Donnell Douglas F15. Dad and 400 other engineers were laid off within 2 weeks. Nearly 10 years later, dad still resented it when I went to work for MDC. Life is strange.
When the military industrial consolidated strange path for the employees of those who got eaten by & buy. Some did well and some suffered. seems like a sift from being manufactured based where they were based to customer = Pentagon where Congess held the purse strings > lobbying. You were at the mercy or luck of.
Fascinating story. I have always thought that North American's airplanes were the most "stylish".
Fascinating. I knew Fokker built planes in the U.S, but had no idea that was the origin of North American.
I learned a lot with this video. I had no idea that North American had that lineage.
Good piece! Just on a trivia note; the American football coach killed in the 1931 Fokker tri-motor crash was Knute Rockne subject of the1940 bio-pic in which Ronald Reagan utters his immortal line,"Get one for the Gipper!".
I'm glad someone finally mentioned Knute by name. Before his untimely death in the plane crash, he was quite well known. By analogy, he might be called the Charles Lindbergh of football.
Dutch person here. Fokker is easy to pronounce correctly. It rhymes with docker and locker.
As soon as you can say smoke and a pancake, I'll work on it.
@@GregsAirplanesandAutomobiles I grew up speaking English and I lived and worked for decades in English speaking countries so I'll take that challenge quite happily.
In English you will often hear foreign names mispronounced when pronouncing them correctly sounds too similar to a 'swear' or 'cuss' word. Fokker is one of these words.
@@billbolton That must be a *very* new type of squeamishness. No-one had a problem with correctly pronouncing Fokker in any of the English speaking countries that I lived in from the 1970s through to the early 2000s.
David, I think you may have missed my point.
More on Ed Schmued; He also designed the F-86, F-100, the P-82, Twin Mustang, and later for Northrop, the T-38/F-5. Love your channel.
These "origins" videos are fascinating and super-enjoyable to absorb.
@Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles As a lifelong aviation enthusiast from the Netherlands, Fokker has always had a special place in my heart. I thought I knew much of the companies history (including the American branch and the repercussions of the crash that killed the football coach), but you pleasantly surprised me with this video. Who would have thought there was a direct link between the Mustang and Fokker. Never too old too learn, so thank you for that fantastic insight!
Read Wagner's book 'Mustang designer'. I can send it to you. There's a lot of detail in there from Schmued about this very thing.
And my Dutch aviation hero is Koolhoven. Since 1913. Fokker the organizer, Koolhoven the engineer, the visionary.
I'm from Russia, old.
That last photo brought back a memory. Around 1968 I was at RAAF Richmond. A CAC Sabre flew down the strip than flew vertically until it was out of sight. Very beautiful airplane.
This is amazing Business / Aviation / Military history! It's honestly far deeper down the rabbit hole than I'd prefer, but it's SO well done I had to watch all of it. I loved the P-51 as a teen WW2 nerd, and the snapshot of Fokker's yacht was superluminal 💙
As an Australian love North American we even built our own variants of Mustangs and Sabres .
Topic Suggestion: A forgotten aircraft that was built by North American Aviation in the late 40s through the early 50s was the AJ-Savage, a carrier based twin engine medium bomber, and the first US Navy aircraft designed from the ground up for the nuclear strike mission role.
I never knew this could be so damn fascinating...! Your photo choices don't simply illustrate events, but are super tasty and compelling. You know exactly what makes the topic interesting, and your enthusiasm and presentation communicate it so effectively.
Holy.... never thought North American and its planes were German origin. This is indeed a very interesting and quality vid.
Greg: For a time, I was an assistant to the physicist who developed the throttle-back optimization scheme for the Atlas rocket, a NAA vehicle developed in California. Funny that NAA moved to Inglewood for its lower cost of doing business (19:06). Nowadays, manufacturers have been fleeing California for decades due to aggressive taxation & regulation, which has decimated the industrial base. Forty years ago GM had two huge manufacturing plants in the LA metro area. They're gone now, along with many others.
Yup, the state of California is trying to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Hi Greg, great video. A little background on myself, fellow ALPA Pilot and Anthony Fokker fanboy. Tony, a high school dropout, was to my knowledge one of aviation most financially successful early pioneers. I read that he filled his sailboat with cold hard currency, precious stones and gold and sailed it to the Netherlands from post armistice Germany. Subsequently was in effect gifted NVF (FOKKER HOLLAND) .Prior to the stock market crash of 1929 he sold of 40% of Atlantic aircraft to GM for 8 million dollars ( over 1.3 billion in today's dollars) whilst gaining the exclusive European sales and production rights to the dc2 and derivatives. Also his first wife was the niece of Hermann Goering (a close friend) along with Donald Douglas senior and Charley chaplain. And finally, yes the lineage is clear, Boeing to this day holds the type certificate to the Fokker super universal.
Thanks Mark, that's a great post.
I'll never forget the year at the Reno Air Races when I meet Ed Horkey.
He was kind enough to take time to talk about the P-51 design with me as we toured the pits.
Even then in the late 90s he was sharp as a tack and was able to explain the technical details to me in laymens terms that i could follow. I remember one thing he pointed out. Nature is the best place to find laminar flow. He used an example of the cross section of a specific fish. Also he seemed to impress upon me that the laminar flow wing was not as big a contributor to the mustangs performance as was the meredith effect from the cooling system design.
Yes, in those days, wind-tunnel models could achieve significant laminar flow while production aircraft couldn't. The virtually perfect wing profile required was beyond mass production techniques of the day. Even with a perfect wing profile, something as small as bug strikes or rain droplets are enough to disturb laminar flow.
The main advantage of the P51's wing profile was that its cross-section was relatively fat farther back (widest point roughly 40% from the front) which allowed significant fuel storage inside it. This helped give the Mustang its legendary long range. Many other aircraft, the Spitfire, for example, had relatively narrow wing cross-sections with the widest point closer to 25% of the cord. This left less room for fuel and, indeed the Spitfire didn't store any fuel in the wing.
The Spitfie did eventually store fuel in the wings.
For years racing plane designers had sought to eliminate conventional radiators to reduce drag. North American realized the radiator could be a source of thrust which compensated for its drag. Spitfires with their boxy underwing radiator did use a 2 dimensional venturi to reduce drag, but nothing like the full up ducted radiator on the P-51.
Come for the engineering, stay for the corporate genealogy. Thanks, Greg!
One of your best Greg. I think I've watched it 3 times now. I love the background
You know I would absolutely not mind watching a full 3 hour deep dive into a particular aircraft or company's history. That stuff is fascinating to me, and id love to see it. And i think that sort of highly detailed technical exploration is where your channel shines.
I don't think you have to worry about keeping the video short, just saying. I think most of us are here for the long haul anyway!
Excellent, Greg, as usual. I enjoyed the corporate twists and turns, and the irony involved in the birth of the P-51 is hard to miss. Among the photos in my dad's collection is a head-on view of a parked P-51, so all you really see is the prop spinner and the landing gear, but dad liked to fly fast - that's why he went into experimental test-flying - and I wouldn't be surprised if he flew a Mustang or two at some point after the war. The video resonates with me personally, as well, as my first real stick time was in 2011 - a birthday gift from my son in the form of a half-hour in the front seat of a T-6. The Navy version was designated SNJ, and dad would certainly have flown one or more of those in advanced training before he was assigned to VF-19 and transitioned to the F6F before the squadron shipped out to the Pacific and their combat tour in 1944. I've since flown a Cessna 172 for a couple hours cross-country, but it's the T-6 experience that has really stuck with me. Dad went to work for McDonnell Aircraft after the war (his badge # was 78), and stayed there until he was killed on a test flight in 1951, on his 35th birthday.
o7
Thx for sharing, incl sad ending at the end. it does seem of the many pioneers of aviation, beyond the recognized heroes most are underappreciated / unnoticed. so it, goes, that's the way History is written. When it takes a Team to bring success.
If anything, I think there’s a bit of a neat parallel, in that the Fokker VII was so feared not because it was a superior performer, but because it was simply possible for a pilot to _use_ the performance already there without killing themselves
The P-51 wasn’t a “leaps and bounds” performer, but it combined a capable airframe with one that was readable and useable by the average pilot.
This is the most awesome airplane-nerd channel ever!
Greg: Did you ever ask yourself, where did North American come from?
Me, an intellectual: North America, surely. Greg is slipping.
A bunch of Aviation history I'd never heard. Thanks Greg!
Great video, I hadn't associated North American with the B-25 and the F-86 even though I did know it but I am just a little disappointed that the XB-70 Valkyrie wasn't mentioned. A picture of it on the cover of one of my college textbooks drew me into my love of aircraft.
The XB-70 Valkyrie is still one of the most visually striking and impressive aircraft ever built...I dare say even more so than the SR-71. I always felt it should have gone into limited production..5 or 6 operational ones would have been good to have in the inventory...
I'd love to watch this tonight but I can't stay up that late so I'm watching the new Perun video.
Great video Greg! I lived in Columbus Ohio and was familiar with the North American/Rockwell plant at Port Columbus airport. That plant produced P-51’s in the war years. The last project there before shutdown was the nacelles for the B-1 Lancer.
What an illuminating video! I did not know any of this background to North American and the Fokker influence. Very impressive video, with a terrific use of archive materials.
A short add regarding Fokker (Netherland) in the mid - late 1930‘s: Fokker built a quite successful fighter, the D. XXI and a heavy 2 engined fighter, the G.I. The trainer you mentioned built under license was a Bücker Bü 181, developed and built by Clemens Bücker at Rangsdorf (near Berlin), license built by Fokker and Zlin in Czechoslovakia during the war. BTW Zlin built several versions post war, Z. 181, Z.281 and Z.381, their only difference was the engine used. Zlin sold a license to Egypt, where they built the Heliopolis Gomhouria in several versions, again a Bü 181 with different engines for different subtypes, the last one using a Continental C-145 engine.
Fokker‘s first successful airplane built post war was a trainer, the S. 11.
Thanks for that good info.
very interesting - thanks.
One notable Fokker was the trimotor (exact model ?) named "Southern Cross" flown by Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Warner, making the first flight across the Pacific, from Oakland California to Brisbane Queensland, via Hawaii and Fiji, in 1928.
The original aircraft was restored and now displayed near Brisbane airport.
Greetings …We are Guaranteed to learn something new every time Greg’s Channel has a new Video… Thanks Greg…
Thanks, I hope I don't let you down on this one.
Greg's choice of images are illuminating. For one to bring Inglewood home to us he showed a downtown shot (18.52) of a movie theatre, screening then, the movie "The Story of Dr Wassell". On a whim I checked it out.... Greg leads us to strange places. Cheers from Australia
I'm impressed how deep you got on that. I didn't know the Fokker connection or Edie Rickenbacker had a hand in NAA.
Fantastic. I had no idea about this and always wondered about the background of Edgar Schmued.
Greg's channel: come for aircraft, stay for the history lesson.
UA-cam was meant for guys like you Greg. The history channel can’t touch what you do.
He got the size of Netherlands wrong, and mispronunces Fokker....
Just to be clear what I said about the size was technically right. Oklahoma is 23 times larger than Holland, just not 23 times larger than "The Netherlands". It's an easy mistake to make. It's not postage stamp sized, it's more like label sized.
1/2 hour fly by... i always feel like Greg has something still left in the chamber when he's done. That's why i always come back. Knowledge is endless, but comprehensible ❤
Another great video, Fokker, North American, Rockwell, and finally Boeing. What an interesting aviation evolutionary journey with so many great airplanes along the way. Now I know why the Ford Tri-motor is so similar to the Fokker.
Hands down Greg's most thrilling and entertaining video, I know of. Less technical, more accessible. Usually enthousiastic comments from aviation connoiseurs. This one is geared towards a broader public of curious, should be massively advertised by UA-cam algo. I watched it in one go, and would have kept on for a lot more.
Genuine story telling talent at work there. Great naration, with that low, soothing voice. The stuff of top tier documentaries, Netflix or better.
Wow, thanks.
Those weren't Texans, those were Harvards, lol. Great video!! And for those not knowing, Havard is the name given to the Texan by Canada and the UK.
Most underated UA-cam channel
Those Fokker Tri-motors were basically the 1st planes to fly around the world, care of some Australian Smiths.
Excellent video…. So when a P-51 shoots down a Ta152 it’s a Fokker shooting down a Focke?
My father worked for Atomics International, a subsidiary of North American, in the 1950s early 60s, which was absorbed into Rockwell for the space program.
My dad was a self taught engineer in the fifty and sixties and did very well. Never wealthy but made a decent living.
A story that has soo many sidequests... You exercised s great deal of restraint keeping it to 30 minutes. GM messed up big time spinning off NAA and trying to get Fisher spun up. Many companies came out of WWII with weird ideas about what was to come. That's a story that would need Yakety Sax for a soundtrack.
I've heard that Pierre Sprey designed it...
Thanks for your amazing work!
Good one. And Sprey himself was the origin of that rumor!
I flew many times on a Fokker F28 passenger jet in the late 1970's when I lived in Rome, NY. The planes were flown from Oneida County Airport by regional service provider, Empire Airlines. The F28 was a comfortable aircraft.
I remember Empire Airlines. Everyone I have met who flew a Fokker F-28 or a Fokker jet really liked it.
Please Gregg, How about a video of A-36, expecially it's name: Apache, Invader or Mustang? Only you can dig deep enough a valid answer! Thanks!
That’s part of why I am here.
That... and just how much the XP-46 had to do with it all
The D.VIIs on the barges were 1920 shipments to the MLD - the Dutch naval air service (still carrying the solid orange roundel)
Excellent info.. From the triplane that ruled the skies of Germany in WWI, to the P-51, that helped the Allies win WWII in the skies again over Germany, is a strange twist of history.
well sleuthed. I had an inkling when reading up on the P51, that Fokker and North American were linked, but couldn't find enough details.
It's interesting, I had just listened to a video from Rex's Hangar discussing the history of Douglas and he lightly covered that plane crash involving the football Coach. Very interesting to get the full context of that considering Douglas was a friend of Fokker.
I read a magazine article many years back that claimed Ford secretly sent a team of engineers into a hangar one night to measure every aspect of a Fokker Trimotor and this was supposedly the genesis for the Ford Trimotor.
Kinda like when supermarine sent someone to Germany to check out heinkel's wing
@@kenneth9874
A lot of leading edge engineering went into the Spitfire wing. Whats so interesting is the performance difference, which was negligible, between the Spitfire mk1 wing and the Bf109e wing despite being so different.
@@briancavanagh7048 yeah, Heinkel did a great job
4:52 Oklahoma is 181000 km².
Netherlands is 40000km². So barely 4 times larger. Not 23 times.
Greg is mistakenly using 7,511 km² which is the area of Holland [two provinces within the Netherlands].
Correct, I was looking at Holland. However you're right, the actual country "The Netherlands" is only about 1/4 the size of Oklahoma, which is still darn small.
My favorite anecdote about the beginning of the Ford trimotor goes like this. Apparently Admiral Byrd flew in a Fokker trimotor to Michigan to talk to Henry Ford. Henry apparently had a penchant to build an aircraft. Henry was talking to Byrd and said "hey I see your plane is sitting out there in the cold, could my men put your aircraft in our hanger? So they moved the plane into the hanger and that's when Ford's men went to work. Supposedly the Ford guys took soft copper tubing and started wrapping the tubing around the aircraft at strategic points and taking measurements thus giving them a template to start building their plane. I haven't seen this story anywhere else and it came from a friend who happened to be an engineer for Pratt and Whitney. If were to be true, it wouldn't surprise me one bit given Henry Fords vast ambitions.
In late 1939 or early 1940 Art Chester, the famous pre-WW2 air race pilot, left the Menasco engine company (where he was in charge of the engine development shop) and was hired by North American. His first design project at North American was the Menasco engine installation on the NA-35 primary trainer. He was then selected by Ed Schmued to lead the engine installation design group on the NA-73X project, responsible for everything firewall-forward. Also, Chester just happened to be the exact size physically for the targeted 5 ft 8 in. pilot for the NA-73X, so he was used as a 'human template' for the cockpit human factors controls layout. After P-51 production got under way, Chester started his own company 'Aircraftsmen Inc.' nearby, to manufacture spinners and other misc. sheet metal pieces for the P-51. As Chester's expertise was vital for North American, he was retained by North American despite the conflict of interest for a further year; Chester's wife Trudy managed Aircraftsmen Inc. until Art left North American in 1942. References: "The Art Chester Story" by John Caler, and "Mustang Designer: Edgar Schmued and the P-51"
What a great story! Thank you Greg, for all your hard (archival) work.
There is another principal happening for the P-51. Roy A. Liming lofted this aircraft using numeric methods that had major impacts on lofting around the world. I learned my trade from Liming's book "Practical Analytic Geometry with Applications to Aircraft" he published in the 1944. This book has copies of the actual lines and lofting plates used to design the p-51.
Yes, as I read about WW2 fighter manufacturers, I had always wondered how NA just showed up, designed and made the P-51 out of no where; then I read the P-51 was designed by a German engineer. Thanks for answering.
As an aside - from what I can find out thus far, Eddie Rickenbacker's 2nd cousin Adolph Rickenbacker desigend and built the world's first electric guitars, and formed what is now *Rickenbacker Guitars.* In the music world, Rickenbacker is a big name - just like Fender, Gibson, Danelectro, Martin, Guild, Gretsch, etc...
I loved this one! I know much more about the period 1909 - 1965 than most people, yet had no idea of Fokker's involvement in the US aircraft industry outside of a couple of transport aircraft.
Excellent job, digging all this up and putting it together.
This is a great video, I have also wondered where NA came from our if nowhere. It's ironic that the two best American interceptors of WW2 are from companies founded by a Russian and a Dutchman. Severski and Folker.
This is absolutely fascinating. In all the years I've admired the p51 I never knew this.
What a pleasant surprise this was, I really thought I knew everything there was to know about the P-51 mustang and its origins and you proved me wrong as you said in the beginning of the video. Excellent stuff
The O-47 was one of the first aircraft flown by the Georgia Air National Guard.
Kindleberger had a saying, that if one was to pull a rabbit out of the hat, you had to put the rabbit in first. So, Fokker was the rabbit!
A+ video. Seriously, you deserve a PhD in history for your work.
Thank you.
America built the Mustang for the British air force. Unfortunately it was underpowered with the Allison engine.
The British designed and put their Spitfire Merlin engine into the P-51s being delivered & used by the British. Under license, the Americans upgraded the British Merlin version with superchargers; which then became the P51-D version of the Mustang.
Greetings, this is Maurice, always happy to see your new videos!
It all begins with Anthony Fokker leaving Germany for The Netherlands with D-7s for sale...Then on to the U.S. to promote civilian airliners. Then General Motors assimilated Fokker, who left the company in 1931. GM then assimilated the North American and American Pilgrim aircraft companies. This became General Aviation. GM moved staff to establish a North American factory in Inglewood, California. Then things got interesting...
Perfect timing Greg. I just happened to be piddling around with the Harvard at our museum and wondering how North American managed to pull off the P51.
Thanks, I heard you guys have a big visitor from Germany headed to your museum. Say hi to him for me.
Wow. Excellent content Greg. Thank you for your dedication to this channel.
Excellent research. Enjoyable video.
You questioned why Ford got out of aviation. I understand from reading "The Arsenal of Democracy" , the reason Henry Ford wanted to get out of aviation, was that Edsel Ford really wanted to get into aviation in a big way, and Henry wanted Edsel to focus on the automotive and truck business.
Which was too bad, because of Edsel's production concepts, by the end of the war, the Willow Run Ford factory was completing a four engine heavy bomber every 42 minutes with very few items on the air trial punch list to be repaired before delivery.
Also Edsel was terminally ill by the later 1940's, so the dream of Ford Aviation died with Edsel.
Take care. I look forward to more of your videos.
Greg knows how to bring the past to life. Brilliant, buddy.
Absolutely fantastic video Greg, always love watching you weave such a remarkable tapestry of history!
Enlightening as all hell. Rare on youtube, but much appreciated.
Really love the video! You pronounce Fokker a bit weird for a Dutch name. The o is a short o, not a long one. The o is pronounce like the second o as in robot.
Thanks for your videos and greetings from The Netherlands!
I suspect the reason for this pronunciation is that, in certain dialects of English, in certain circumstances there is not a lot of distance between the vowel usually written as "u" and the vowel usually written as "o". So I think this pronunciation may have developed as a way to avoid sounding like one is saying the "f word". Just my theory, I've got no evidence to back it up.
@@RaytheonTechnologies_Official oh yeah fully understand it and indeed it sounds a lot like the f-word now you say it.
Its also not a big deal, but since in some videos Greg is like "sorry for butchering the name" and he kinda did it here if you are very picky with it haha!
Fascinating history Greg! Thank you for your untiring work in this field of aviation. Please keep this kind of content coming. Cheers!
Thanks for another super interesting video Greg!
I was unaware of this particular part of Fokker's history on how it formed the roots of the North American Aircraft Company.
Somewhat related, this summer we saw the first flight of a rebuilt Fokker D.XXI here in The Netherlands.
I was excited to hear information of the GA-43. I had originally learned of it from the book Scale Airplane Drawings: Volume 1 from Paul Matt. I was intrigued by the early airliner's design, it had an interesting combination of modern (for the time) and anachronistic features. I'm glad to hear more of the story.
Greg, your knowledge and dedication is impressive. Can't get enough of the content you provide. Please keep us UA-camrs fulfilled. Cheers 👍!
Excellent overview Greg of NAA, in a pretty convoluted history pared down into 28 minutes! Well done.
Yes, it's quite complex, I skipped a lot of the minor players but I think I managed to cover the gist of it in under 30 mins.
Another great video, Greg there is no one that gets to the nuts and bolts of a topic like you do, keep up the great work.
One of my earliest memories, is of being aboard the Ford Trimotor owned by the Kleberg Family, at KMQS, of "King Ranch" fame. It landed with a fuel transfer problem, which my neighbor rebuilt a pump for, and replaced, with the help of my father. I remember, to my 'old man's' horror, my noticing the full-service bar in the rear of the aircraft, with distaste, to say the least. That was in 1964, and was likely the event responsible for my gaining a pilot's license, and eventually, an ATPL/career in commercial (the big stuff) aviation.