Fokker F.VII

The F.VII was the first member of a family that would become famous as the "Fokker Trimotor", but the first aircraft to carry the name did not have three engines; they had a single engine in the nose. The design came out of Fokker's drawing office under Walter Rethel and was, according to the Dutch and Polish Wikipedia, a development of the single-engined Fokker F.V. The aim was a modern passenger aircraft with good range for the routes of the day.

It was a high-wing monoplane of mixed construction, the formula Fokker used for its transports. The first example flew on 11 April 1924.

The five F.VIIs built were given twelve-cylinder inline engines: a 360 hp (about 270 kW) Rolls-Royce Eagle or a 450 hp (about 340 kW) Napier Lion. Later one of them was re-engined with a 400 hp (about 300 kW) nine-cylinder Bristol Jupiter radial, and two others with 480 hp (about 360 kW) Jupiter VIs built by Gnome-Rhône. The cockpit held two crew; for passengers the sources disagree: the English and Spanish Wikipedia give six seats, the Polish one eight.

Production stopped at five aircraft, built in 1924 and 1925, and all of them went to KLM. The reason was that Fokker quickly prepared a much improved and slightly larger model, the F.VIIa, which flew on 12 March 1925 and replaced the original F.VII on the production line. That F.VIIa, converted to three engines, would give rise to the trimotor that dominated air transport in the late 1920s.

In the mid-1920s commercial routes rarely exceeded 300 to 400 kilometres and avoided long stretches over open sea, while the sea voyage from Europe to the Indonesian archipelago took several weeks. In the Netherlands the idea arose of linking the country by air with its largest colony, the Dutch East Indies. In 1923 the Comité Vliegtocht Nederland-Indië was set up, and it was joined by KLM, founded in 1919, and by the Fokker factory. It mattered to the Dutch that the flight be made in a domestically built aircraft, and Fokker provided one of its newest machines: a KLM F.VII registered H-NACC.

The crew were KLM pilot Jan Thomassen à Thuessink van der Hoop, Lieutenant Van Weerden Poelman of the Dutch army air arm (Luchtvaartafdeeling) as second pilot, and flight engineer Van den Broeke.

H-NACC took off from Schiphol on 1 October 1924. Two days later an engine failure cut the journey short: the aircraft had to make an emergency landing near Philippopel (Plovdiv) in Bulgaria. The damage to the airframe was minor and could be repaired, but the engine was beyond repair and had to be replaced. The news set off a wave of solidarity in the Netherlands: readers of the illustrated magazine Het Leven raised the money for a new engine, which was bought and shipped to Bulgaria at the end of the month.

On 2 November 1924 H-NACC set off again. On 23 November it landed at Muntok, and on 24 November it reached Batavia, today's Jakarta, where the crew received an enthusiastic welcome. In all it had covered more than 15,000 kilometres in 55 days, with 127 hours in the air.

After a few local flights in the Indies, H-NACC was dismantled and returned to the Netherlands aboard a steamship of the Koninklijke Rotterdamsche Lloyd. It was lost on 9 July 1926 in an accident in dense fog near Wolvertem, Belgium.

The flight proved that the Netherlands could be linked by air with its largest colony, and gave KLM and Fokker the basis for pursuing a regular service to Asia. At the same time the single-engined F.VII remained the starting point of the whole family: the single-engined F.VIIa, the F.VIIa/3m and F.VIIb/3m trimotors and the versions built under licence in several countries all descend from Rethel's 1924 design.

The material consulted does not state which engine H-NACC carried on the flight to Batavia, nor does it give the registrations and fate of the other four KLM F.VIIs.