Fokker’s Famous Friendship

(The Friendship Story is not really what it says, for it is really the story of the Dart as well, for without the Dart there would have been no F27, as there would have been no Viscount. )

Mr Watkins was struck by the fact that his engineering staff had been working on the idea of a two prop-jet airliner which might form a team of two contrasting-sized airliner with the Vickers Viscount 700. TAA was already operating the Convair 240, the first pressurised airliner on domestic rouIes here in late 1948, and was firming up on the Vickers Viscount. Mr Watkins went to Vickers in August 1952 to sign an order, while Sir Ivan Holyman, upset that TAA had got in first, went off in a huff to California and ordered DC6Bs.

TAA’s people considered the Dart a great engine. With two types of aircraft and one engine, engineering costs would be minimised.

When Mr Watkins discussed the idea with George Edwards, who had designed the Viscount, he was told Vickers was not interested in twin-engined aircraft, and that the day of the twin was over.

On a subsequent visit Sir George, as he later became, agreed there was room for a small prop-jet airliner but that it must have four small engines if Mr Watkins could suggest an engine. It is easy in retrospect to criticise Edwards, but the fact is that many industry people agreed with him on the twin issue. TAA knew that its inland routes were ideal for twins, though overseas routes needed four engines. ANA at the time agreed with Vickers. They liked the Handley Page Herald, which originally had four-piston engines until some sense prevailed. In fact, ANA took the Australian agency for the Herald.

Mr Watkins told Vickers that no airline could sensibly accept four engines when two would do, as there was mathematically more chance of losing one in four than one in two, and that four engines would cost more to buy and to operate and to maintain. The Convair 240 had proved the point convincingly.

I remember discussing this with Sir Frederick Handley Page, who was no fool but had some fixed ideas. He had sent the Australian A. F. Bush Bandil around the world to sound out operators about a small airliner. Bush came back full of news that the operators wanted four engines and pistons at that. He told me later that they did, but Ron Walesby, who runs the Australian side of Fokker, tells me tha1 when Bush visited East-West at Tamworth, where Ron was employed at the time, Bush practically told them the piston was best. In any <1se, East-West was a pretty unsophisticated outfit ju$t then and hardly knew what a prop-jet looked like, so one could hardly blame Bush in some ways.

Anyway, Sir Frederick put four Leonides piston engines in the Herald and started selling them until he knew Fokker was firm on the Dart and then he hastily replaced the four Leonides with two darts. Queensland Airlines, by the way, placed a Herald order.

Avro quickly got into the act in Manchester with the 748, which was designed and developed with money refunded by the Commissioners of Taxation. They used Darts from the start. In the event, the Herald was a sales failure, while the HS 748 is still in production around the 330 mark, less than half the F27 production runs to date, but not a bad performance. To return to history, Mr Watkins and his boys played a great part in the development of the original Friendship pro­ ject into a viable airliner. (They also had considerable in­ fluence on the Viscount, so they knew their way around. ) They were helped when the great Fritz Diepen joined Fokker as Commercial Director in 1952, intent on selling Friendships by the Hundred. TAA’s idea for a small Viscount played a great part in the original design and then TAA argued about such things as the type of window (Fokker’s was antique by American standards) and the type and placement of seats. They progressively got the passenger load up. They argued that the Dart was powerful and could lift more payload than might be thought.

In 1954 Diepen told TAA that it would help Fokker to get Government aid from The Hague if TAA provided written in­ terest. So the then-Chairman, G. P. N. Watt, signed a letter that did not commit TAA in any way but which allowed Diepen to offer TAA a special price of £165,000 if and when our Government airline definitely placed an order. Both sides were gratified. It allowed TAA engineers to take an increased interest and wield a greater influence. The Friendship became bigger and provided more payload when it was delivered, because of TAA’s interest.

A big TAA influence was in the area of range. While the Dutch designers were thinking in terms of DC3 replacement – as Handley Page and Avro also were – they were reluctant to give it the range the Australians needed. TAA succeeded in getting more range out of the designers, so benefiting the whole Friendship project. They also pushed the fatigue life of the friendship up much further than the Dutch had originally intended, also with great universal benefit.

But there was one aspect in which TAA was at first in error. TAA in 1951 was thinking in terms of a low-wing air­ craft. When the Dutch told them the F27 must be high-wing, they did not argue. So the Friendship became the only high­ wing airliner the Australian airliners operated.

TAA had a long wait: the first actual order was placed in 1956, being the third airline order Fokker enjoyed. TAA has the reputation of being the first airline to order the Fokker because of that 1954 letter, but in fact Aer Lingus of Eire ordered first and took first delivery.

The Friendship had made its first flight well before TAA ordered, on November 24, 1955, when it was obvious that H.

C. van Meerten, the other great name in the story, and his design team had succeeded. This was a clean aeroplane – the Friendships made now and later are still the same basic design. The whole project was so impressive the Americans decided to get into it and Fairchild started making Friendships under licence. Fairchild got its first aeroplane into operation with West Coast Airlines on September 27, 1958, while the first Dutch aeroplane started Aer Lingus operations on December 15.

For those of us who visited Fokker during the develop­ ment of the F27, Schipol was a fascinating place – I was first at Fokker in 1954. The firm settled down to be run by two men, not the usual one. Diepen had been running his own aviation company before he joined Fokker and was well-experienced to look after the business side. H. C. van Meerten had been Chief Designer when the Friendship project began, had actually signed that original 1951 letter to TAA, and was wonder­ fully qualified to take over everything but the business side.

Mr van Meerten was a fine cricketer, playing until well into his S0s and I believe past 60. Anyway, I went into his of­ fice in 1966 to find his arm in a sling: playing for an over-50s team in the Dutch senior competition he had slipped while running and broken the arm. The public relations manager at Fokker for many years had been Holland’s best batsman, to which he owed his job as much as to his ability in PR. Cricket is very popular in Holland and that PR man was in his heyday good enough for English county cricket had he wanted to cross the sea.

But it was Mr Diepen who made the great friendships out here, to turn a pun. His daughter worked here for a time as an air hostess with TAA and he liked being here on a personal basis.

They are both out of Fokker now, more is the pity. But looking back on my records I find that Mr Van Meerten had explained that when they began thinking of an airliner they had three possible engines – Wright Cyclone pistons, or the Mamba or Dart, the Mamba being another prop-jet. The Mamba in fact seemed to be the more economical of the two, theoretically, but the fact that the Viscount was going to be Dart-powered turned the trick. And that choice decided the size of the aircraft. One problem was the gear ratio, as the Friendship would have only two engines. Rolls-Royce made the change on request.

The high wing was preferred after wind tunnel research as giving a better maximum lift coefficient and also because the low floor level made possible by this decision allowed greater ease of loading. The high wing went against normal practice at the time. The designers had to take care they rein­ forced the fuselage bottom to cover the belly landing possibility. Mr van Meerten considered the high wing helped seat-mile costs.

Another big decision was metal-to-metal bonding on main components. At the time the industry was using this method but only for secondary components. Using this method was a very daring step, even a commercial risk, for it had to be sold to the potential customer, even to the Dutch civil aviation authorities. He was very worried to start with, as rejection rates ran up to 50 per cent. But it finally worked.

The point was that Fokker’s top echelon realised that to get into the airline business again they had to be a step ahead. Mr van Meerten spent two months of real anxiety, and sleepless nights until the rejection rate was reduced. The only other aeroplane with that bonding at the time was the little DH Dove.

Fokker also adopted fibreglass and plastics to a degree not seen in any other aircraft at the time. There had been a big American study of fibreglass and plastic for radomes and Fokker had used this to provide fibreglass polyester fairings instead of hinged sheet metal work and panel beating in its S14 Trainer before the Friendship. Admittedly, glass fibre did not work out in some applications in the F27 and had to be replaced with metal, but by and large it worked.

At the time, also, the Dove was the only sizeable aircraft with pneumatics in the undercarriage. Mr van Mecrten went ahead with this also and today Friendship is the only commercial aircraft boasting a pneumatic undercart. Fokker have always been surprised they stand alone in this.

It was no wonder that Fairchild was impressed or that 205 FH227s, as the American version was known, were built and sold. How that came about is rather fascinating. Piedmont had been one of the Airlines Mr van Meerten had contacted in 1951. Its president testified in a Congressional hearing that the Friendship would be very good, probably the best DCJ replacement there was in 1952. Within three days Fairchild was in Holland and took a licence almost at once, or at least an option, for the firm awaited the first flight for the final signature. By then Fairchild had done a market survey in the USA.

Fairchild benefited from the bonding process, which was only an idea to them, while Fokker benefited by Arctic flying and by provision of a big cargo door, which had a significant influence on later sales. Fokker had not considered such a door, which created quite a design and testing problem for both companies, but it worked.

Fokker, therefore, benefited from other firm’s ex­perience and not only from TAA. And TAA was not the only Australian firm to bring rich ideas to Schipol. Ansett was late to sign for Friendships – June 28, 1958 – but soon realised the quality of this aeroplane. Ansett engineers and operating staff worked with Fokker people to develop the pallet system which shortened turn-around times of the cargo or, in Ansett’s case, the Quick Change, version. Ansett and TAA use some of their Friendships by day, with passengers, and then turn them into night all-cargo aircraft. Five pallets are used for the cargo and one for the seats, if necessary, or six cargo pallets.

Today, the Friendship is in a unique situation. By developing new versions, Fokker has found many operators to replace their older Friendships with newer versions -something of a surprising situation. In this country, East-West and Ansett have sold off a number of their older 100s and 200s for the new 500s with improved performance, and Air New Zealand is adopting the same policy.

But the entire Australian Fokker story is unique. Hard as it may be to believe, more than a quarter of Fokker’s entire Friendship production has been sold by the Australian office. Before the widely respected and much-loved Pim Moree was killed in an air accident in the Philippines on April 10, 1967, the Sydney office had sales responsibility in Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Malaya/Singapore – never Indonesia. Sydney and later Melbourne (the firm went down south after Moree died) have sold 133 Friendships to those countries – 62 in Australia, 18 in the Philippines, 20 in Malaya and Singapore, 21 in New Zealand, 12 in New Guinea. The office had also handled a large number of sales of used Friendships.

The start of this success was due, naturally, to the quality of the aircraft, but Pim Moree’s very personality had a great deal to do with it, as well as the firm’s policy of always putting a technical representative of the highest quality into the customer’s engineering organisation until the aircraft was set. Today, Fokker has delivered or has on order some 480 Friendships, will reach 500 within a short time and knows from market research that the total will go past 800 to make, with the American manufacture of 205, a four-figure total in the 1990s, if not the late 1980s. This is a fantastic result when you consider that Fokker had to be entirely reconstituted from the 1945 wreckage.

The variants include the original 100 with the Dart 6 engine, then the 200 with the Mark 7, and the 300 with the Mark 6 again, for this is a Combi version with a metal floor and big cargo door. The 400 has the Mark 7, with a military variant that has a rear door, while the 500 is the stretched version (4 feet11 inches more) with big cargo door and the Mark 7 engine. The 600 is the 200 with a big cargo door, while the 700 is the 100 with a big cargo door. Any of these can be varied with a special rough airfield undercarriage. And then there is the Maritime version and also the version for calibration flying (which our Department of Civil Aviation had) which is a 200 basically. Finally, there is the S00F, which is not a freight ver­ sion, curiously, but the 500 without the large cargo door! – Ansett has this.

You can go to Schipol and order any of these versions, for Fokker will make any to order, but as Rolls-Royce has dropped the Mark 6 engine the 100 is hardly on.

What a story it is! The latest news here is that Fokker is still selling 500s in New Zealand, though the plan for local assembly there for Air New Zealand and the RNZAF did not eventuate after all, as Wellington does not have that sort of money. The 500 is still flowing into Ansett and East-West. Eddie Connellan now operates a secondhand Friendship 200 leased from Air Niugini. And TAA now and then thinks about some 500s but never gets around to ordering them.

Fokker did miss out once, of course, when Sir Robert Menzies did his famous deal in London to keep Australian primary goods going in there and had the RAAF order HS- 748s instead of F27s. As the airlines had F27s the RAAF had wanted them for obvious reasons.

And Fokker’s Australian office still goes out hard after F27 sales, even though the F28 is the glamorous aircraft now.

Aircraft orders are seldom funny, but one concerns the two Friendships that Australia bought from Malayan Airways and gave to Bangladesh just after independence came to that happy area. Three years later the people sold these aircraft for three times the price the Australian Government paid.