Hamburger Flugzeugbau
| Industry | Aircraft building company |
|---|---|
| Fate | Merged |
| Predecessor | Blohm & Voss |
| Successor | Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) |
| Founded | 1933 |
| Defunct | 1969 |
| Headquarters | Hamburg, Germany |
Hamburger Flugzeugbau was an aircraft company, located in the Finkenwerder quarter of Hamburg, Germany. The company was established in July 1933 as a subsidiary of the Blohm & Voss shipbuilders. It later became an operating division within its parent company. In the postwar period it has managed to survive under different names as part of different consortia, and participates in the present day Airbus and European aerospace program.
In the early 1930s the Blohm & Voss shipbuilders in Hamburg were suffering from a lack of work and its owners, brothers Rudolf and Walter Blohm, decided to branch out into the related business of all-metal seaplane construction. Together with their brother-in-law Dipl-Ing Max Andreae and experienced aviator Robert Schröck, they founded Hamburger Flugzeugbau with the intent of building long-range passenger seaplanes for Deutsche Luft Hansa. It was at that time commonly believed that transatlantic air transport would soon take over the role filled by the luxury liners of that time. It was also thought that those planes would be seaplanes and flying boats as they could use the infrastructure and capacity of the seaports already in place, while land facilities at that time were unsuited to such large aeroplanes.
Schröck persuaded the designer Herr Mewes away from Heinkel and, with four other designers, on 1 July they began work. Their first aircraft, the Ha 135, took off on its first fight on 28 April in the next year, 1934. But Mewes was unfamiliar with all-metal construction and had built it with a fabric covering.
During this period the ruling Nazi party was massively increasing the interwar re-armament program which included the complete overhaul of the aircraft industry. In particular, the Nazis wanted the technical capacities to quickly build large numbers of warplanes for the new Luftwaffe. As a result, the company took on subcontract manufacture of Junkers Ju 52 subassemblies, thus gaining valuable experience in the manufacture of all-metal aircraft.
With Mewes now out of his depth, on the advice of the RLM, the company offered the job of chief designer to Richard Vogt, then in the same position at Kawasaki in Japan and experienced in all-metal construction. Vogt accepted, a new team was recruited and Mewes and his four colleagues left.
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Wikipedia