Fokker Eindekker
| Fokker Eindecker | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Captured Fokker E.III 210/16 in flight at Upavon, Wiltshire in 1916. | |
| Role | Fighter |
| Manufacturer | Fokker |
| Designer | Martin Kreutzer |
| First flight | 23 May 1915 (modified M.5 A.16/15 serving as a E.I prototype, flown by Otto Parschau) |
| Number built | 416 |
The Fokker Eindecker fighters were a series of German World War I monoplane single-seat fighter aircraft designed by Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker. Developed in April 1915, the first Eindecker ("Monoplane") was the first purpose-built German fighter aircraft and the first aircraft to be fitted with a synchronization gear, enabling the pilot to fire a machine gun through the arc of the propeller without striking the blades. The Eindecker gave the German Air Service a degree of air superiority from July 1915 until early 1916. This period, during which Allied aviators regarded their poorly armed aircraft as "Fokker Fodder", became known as the "Fokker Scourge".
The Eindecker was based on Fokker's unarmed Fokker M.5K scout (military designation Fokker A.III) which imitated the design of the French Morane-Saulnier H shoulder-wing monoplane, but using chrome-molybdenum steel tubing for the fuselage structure instead of wood. It was fitted with an early version of the Fokker synchronizer mechanism controlling a single Parabellum MG14 machine gun. Anthony Fokker personally demonstrated the system on 23 May 1915, having towed the prototype aircraft behind his touring car to a military airfield near Berlin.
The history of the "prototype" Eindecker aircraft (Fokker factory number 216) which was used for Fokker's initial synchronizer trials is closely associated with Leutnant Otto Parschau, who was allotted this aircraft, then a Fokker A-series unarmed scout with the serial number A.16/15, at the beginning of World War I. This aircraft had been privately purchased in 1913 by Oberleutnant Waldemar von Buttlar, and requisitioned by the Fliegertruppe along with his commissioning as an officer in the Prussian Army at the outbreak of hostilities, and had been painted a shade of green, the color of von Buttlar's previous Marburg-based Jäger regiment. Parschau had served with the same, surreptitiously named Brieftauben-Abteilung Ostende (BAO), in Belgium as Oberleutnant von Buttlar did in November 1914, where the two German officers could have first made contact. Parschau eventually spent most of the first year of the war with this aircraft, flying it on both the Eastern and Western fronts. At some stage he had the words "Lt. Parschau" painted on the right upper side (and possibly both sides) of the fuselage behind the cockpit. This aircraft had its main fuel tank located behind the cockpit.
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Wikipedia