Fokker F.VII

Walter Rethel designed the F.VII as a single-engined transport, and five were built for the Dutch airline KLM; one of them, registered H-NACC, made the first flight from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies in 1924. The type first flew on 24 November 1924 and entered service in 1925. That year Anthony Fokker, then living in the United States, heard of the inaugural Ford Reliability Tour, a competition for transport aircraft, and had the company's head designer Reinhold Platz convert a single-engined F.VIIA airliner into a trimotor with 200 hp Wright Whirlwind radials. The result, designated F.VIIA-3m, flew on 4 September 1925 and won the American event later that year. Its structure paired a fabric-covered steel-tube fuselage with a plywood-skinned wooden wing.

Several generations followed. Probably only eighteen F.VIIA-3m aircraft were built, although many F.VIIAs were upgraded to that standard. The main production variant was the F.VIIB-3m, with heavier engines on offer, among them the 300 hp Wright Whirlwind, the Armstrong Siddeley Lynx and the 360 hp Titan Major, plus greater span and modified wing geometry: 154 were built, licence production included. Outside the Netherlands it was manufactured by SABCA with 29 aircraft, Avia with 18, three Italian machines as the IMAM Ro.10 for Avio Linee Italiane and Ala Littoria, three in Spain, and Poland's Plage i Laśkiewicz, which between 1929 and 1930 delivered eleven F.VIIB-3m plus twenty of its own bomber version developed by Jerzy Rudlicki. The larger derivatives were the twin-engined F.VIII, the twenty-passenger F.IX and the American F-10, which took twelve.

The F.VII was the explorers' aeroplane. Richard E. Byrd claimed to have flown over the North Pole in the F.VIIA-3m Josephine Ford on 9 May 1926, a few days before Roald Amundsen managed it in the airship Norge; Lieutenants Lester Maitland and Albert Hegenberger made the first transpacific flight from the continental United States to Hawaii, some 2400 miles, on 28 and 29 June 1927 in the Atlantic-Fokker C-2 Bird of Paradise; and Byrd, Bernt Balchen and two companions carried the first official transatlantic airmail in the C-2 America, which crash-landed off the coast of France on 1 July 1927. Charles Kingsford Smith crossed the Pacific from the United States to Australia for the first time in June 1928 in the F.VIIB-3m Southern Cross and flew the Tasman Sea and back that September; Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic on 17 June 1928, as a passenger aboard the F.VIIB-3m Friendship; and a United States Army Air Corps crew led by Carl Spaatz passed 150 hours aloft in the C-2A Question Mark between 1 and 7 January 1929 using aerial refuelling. Not every attempt ended well: the St. Raphael vanished without trace trying to cross the Atlantic from east to west on 31 August 1927, and the Old Glory was lost over the North Atlantic days later.

The eight- to twelve-seat Fokker dominated the American market in the late 1920s, but its standing collapsed after the 1931 crash of a Transcontinental & Western Air F-10 that killed Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach. The investigation pointed to problems with the Fokker's plywood-laminate construction, which brought a temporary ban from commercial flights, stricter maintenance requirements and a shift in the market towards all-metal aircraft such as the Ford Trimotor and later the Boeing 247 and the Douglas DC-2. Production ended in 1932.