The Junkers F 13 was an innovative product of a great man with a united country behind him. The industry he worked in now requires a consortium of companies and countries to ever more rarely bring a product to market. In the optimism of 1991, Germany can be forgiven to look back fondly at what was accomplished and imagining it could happen again. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
If there is a failure in the aesthetics of this stamp, it is not capturing how radical this airplane would have looked in 1919. It was a world of open cockpit biplanes. The stamp does however show you the characteristic corrugated alluminum alloy skin that made the advancement possible. So as with so many stamps, the more you look the more you see.
Todays stamp is issue A711, a 30 pfennig stamp issued by Germany on April 9th 1991. It was a 4 stamp issue in various denominations remembering German pre war civilian airplanes and airships. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 35 cents whether mint or used.
Hugo Junkers founded his company in 1895 in Dessau, Germany initially manufacturing boilers and radiators. Hugo had some radical ideas for getting into the manufacture of airplanes. He had the idea that aluminum could be made strong enough that the skin of an airplane could be made integral to it’s structure. This would reduce weight and allow for better aerodynamics. To make this work, Junkers developed an age hardened alloy of aluminum that they called Duralumin and further strengthened the metal by corrugating it. The resulting F 13 airliner of 1919 was thus a revelation facing the post World War I need for civilian airliners.
Hugo Junkers had to work hard to market his airplane. One thing he did was start his own airline that in turn bought over 60 of the airplane. His airline was eventually in 1926 merged with an airline subsidiary of the Lloyd’s shipping line to form Lufthansa which in turn took another 72 F13s. Junkers offered low down payments and lease deals that got F13s flying all over the world. The planes had a variety of different engines mostly from Daimler Benz, BMW, and in house Junkers designs, but the airframe was perhaps more advanced than the engines available. Over 300 F13s were built by 1932 and the technology developed was still very much in evidence in the later larger and more numerous tri motor Junkers airliners.
As the politics in Germany changed it became quite bad personally for Hugo Junkers. He was requested by the Nazi government to participate in the rearming of Germany. Hugo said no thank you. He was then put under house arrest and told to give up his stock in the company he founded and all of his patents. In exchange, Hugo would not be tried for high treason. Hugo was an older man by then not up to the stress coming his way and he died at home still under arrest. The stolen company then went on to build many notable warplanes such as the Stuka dive bomber. In the 1960s the remnants of the Junkers operation were merged into Messerschmitt.
In 2016, a new build replica of the Junkers F-13 was built as a personal tribute to Hugo Junkers. Though it had a radio and a transponder, it was otherwise original including a rebuilt 1930s vintage Pratt and Whitney radial engine. The technicians and engineers on the project had so much fun, that they agreed to take further orders and at least 4 new builds have been completed. Not bad for a now over 100 year old airplane.
Well my drink is empty but I will be ready the next time Germany wants to toast Hugo Junkers. Come again for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.