Fokker

Loops, spins, figure eights, low-altitude precision work.

She flew in Fokker aircraft, the same manufacturer whose planes had spent four years of war trying to kill Allied pilots.

She learned well.

When she came back to the United States in the fall of 1922, she was not just a pilot, she was a performer.

He said he wants to go watch and then figure out the hole that he's missing that he hasn't done in his career.

And I'm like, we don't need any more Fokker movies, I can tell you that much.

Well, there's one coming out this year.

There's another one.

Aircraft designers were getting serious about range, and suddenly the prize attracted real contenders.

Commander Richard Byrd, who had already flown over the North Pole, was organizing a tri-motor Fokker with a serious, well-funded crew.

Clarence Chamberlain was working toward a record-setting endurance flight in his Belanca monoplane.

The French war heroes Charles Nungesser and Francois Coley attempted the crossing from Paris in early May of 1927 and vanished somewhere over the Atlantic.

It need not necessarily be more mobile than any other squadron, and it need not indulge in free colorings, though in the nature of its work its flying must be acrobatic.

the british circuses are in these days superior to the german circuses because our machines are now at least as good as those of the germans and so our men who have always been of higher average quality than the german aviators have a fair chance of proving their work of those upon richthofen's surface mentioned in the book schaefer was the first to be killed before the war he lived in london to learn english working in an office in the city when so inclined but mostly spending his time on the river or in sport those who knew him say that he was a pleasant lad and a good sportsman lost was the next to go after what has been described by those who were in it as one of the most gallant fights of the war On a Fokker triplane with a French Lerone engine, evidently an experimental machine built for quick maneuvering, he fought single-handed a patrol of six of our people when he could have broken off the fight and have got away by abandoning an inferior companion.

He was a brave man and a most brilliant pilot.

His flying and shooting in his last fight are said to have been marvelously clever.

I become a pilot.

On Christmas Day, 1915, I passed my third examination.

In connection with it I flew to Schwerin, where the Fokker works are situated, and had a look at them.

As observer I took with me my mechanic, and from Schwerin I flew with him to Breslau, from Breslau to Schweidnitz, from thence to Luben, and then returned to Berlin.

But they expanded some Canadian cities, getting Montreal, Ottawa.

And then they added some Fokker F-27s, 28s jets to the fleet.

But that's not going to be a factor for this.

They ceased independent operations when they were acquired by Business Express Airlines in 1986.

No weather satellite imagery on an EFB.

Just a wall of cumulonimbus rising ahead of the nose, the kind that goes from the surface all the way to where the air gets too thin to breathe, and a 71-foot Fokker Trimotor loaded so heavy with gasoline she barely cleared the fence at the end of the runway in Hawaii.

The navigator, a former Navy man named Harry Lyon, is lying on his back in the fuselage, shooting star fixes through a hatch in the roof with a mechanical octant, doing the math in his head and on paper, trying to hold their position against a Pacific that gives nothing away for free.

The radio is going in and out, the weather ahead looks like it was designed specifically to kill them, and they still have 2,000 miles to go before they see land.

The Australian government briefly backed Smithy and Ulm, then withdrew the funding when the enterprise started looking too much like organized suicide.

They kept going.

The airplane they ultimately flew was a Fokker F-7B trimotor called the Southern Cross.

She had a wingspan of 71 feet and three Wright J-5 whirlwind engines.