Fokker’s Famous Friendship

It is just 20 years since the first Fokker F27 Friendships came into this country and yet you can see in recent issues of leading aviation magazines double-page advertisements for the same aircraft. This is quite fantastic. After more than 20 years of operation, the F27 is still so popular the firm no longer circulates lists of secondhand Friendships because no list has time to form itself – used aircraft are harder to find than new ones. Fokker is still building 16 a year.

All this looks even more fantastic when you realise Ihat Fokker started Friendship thinking back in 1950 and that it looks very much as if it will be making them in the 1990s.

From the Australian standpoint, the story began when TAA’s Director of Engineering, John L. Watkins, received a letter from Fokker in Schipol saying that they were Thinking of getting back into commercial business again. Fokker had been very prominent between the wars when the Germans departed Holland in 1945 they had to reform and work up their military side first. They were thinking in terms of a smallish airliner powered by two Rolls-Royce Darts.

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