Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation

Description

Comprehensive biography of Anthony Fokker, the famed Dutch pilot and daredevil aviator Anthony Fokker- The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation tells the larger-than-life true story of maverick pilot and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker. Fokker came from an affluent Dutch family and developed a gift for tinkering with mechanics. Despite not receiving a traditional education, he stumbled his way into aviation as a young stunt pilot in Germany in 1910. He survived a series of spectacular airplane crashes and rose to fame within a few years. A combination of industrial espionage, luck, and deception then propelled him to become Germany's leading aircraft manufacturer during World War I, making him a multimillionaire by his midtwenties. When the German Revolution swept the country in 1918 and 1919, Fokker made a spectacular escape to the United States. He set up business in New York and New Jersey in 1921, and shortly thereafter became the world's largest aircraft manufacturer. The U.S. Army and Navy acquired his machines, and his factories equipped legendary carriers such as Pan American and TWA at the dawn of commercial air transport. Yet despite his astounding success, his empire collapsed in the late 1920s after a series of ill-conceived business decisions and deeply upsetting personal dramas. In 1927, aviator Richard Byrd solicited a Fokker three-engine plane to be the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. The plane was damaged on a test flight and Charles Lindbergh beat him to it. Lindbergh's solo adventure in the Spirit of St. Louis earned him--and cost Fokker--a lasting place in the history books. Using previously undiscovered records and primary sources, Marc Dierikx traces Fokker's extraordinary life and celebrates his spectacular achievements.

MARC DIERIKX is a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published some fifteen books on the history of aviation, air transport, and other topics.

WALL STREET JOURNAL Fokker was surely some kind of genius. He taught himself to fly, then to build flying machines until he had one that satisfied him. This was in 1911, when he was 21, eight years after the world's first powered flight. In "Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation," Marc Dierikx tells the story of this fascinating man and tells it well. BOOKLIST In this straightforward, well-sourced biography, Dierikx reveals the life of aviation legend Anthony Fokker. The Dutch pilot and aircraft manufacturer built his company by supplying the German military during WWI, when he perfected the timing mechanism that allowed pilots to shoot through the propeller while flying. A millionaire before he was 25, Fokker's business fortunes were rocked by German politicaland economic unrest in the 1920s, forcing him to smuggle millions out in a risky escape. Eventually, he moved to America, where his aircraft achieved fame on record-setting flights, and he became the highly successful European sales representative for the Douglas and Lockheed companies. Fokker's story, which also includes no small amount of personal tragedy, will be extremely appealing to military and aviationhistory fans. It also provides general history readers with a fascinating glimpse at an era where the lines between heroes and villains were blurred, even on the battlefield, and a stunt pilot could, remarkably, through sheer force of will, become an incredibly wealthy man.