Junkers F 13 variant
Junkers F 13 F 13W
The designation applied to F 13s fitted with floats in place of the wheeled undercarriage. The swap was quick and left the airframe essentially untouched, which made the type a practical seaplane in countries with more rivers than aerodromes.
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- Passengers
History
An interchangeable undercarriage
The F 13 was designed from the outset with dedicated fittings for exchanging its wheels for a pair of duralumin floats, each divided internally into six watertight compartments. No structural or wing changes were needed. The same arrangement allowed duralumin skis to be fitted, with a shoe on the tail skid, for operation off snow and ice.
Why it mattered
In the 1920s usable rivers, lakes and bays were far more plentiful than airstrips and civil airports. An aeroplane that could switch from land to water in a few hours opened routes that otherwise did not exist, and that was one of the type's most effective selling points outside Europe. The one known drawback was directional control on floats, compensated on some aircraft by extending the rudder.
Where it flew
Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano took floatplane examples to work Bolivia's rivers. In Spain the Red Cross bought F 13W ambulance aircraft that served during the Alhucemas landing in 1925. In Sweden AB Aerotransport opened the Stockholm–Helsinki route with a float-equipped F 13 in 1924, and in Germany three aircraft registered D 272, D 583 and D 433 flew the Altona–Dresden water route in 1925 and 1926. The United States Navy received two JL-6s on floats.
A telling case
During the Colombia–Peru war the Colombian military fitted floats to four landplanes handed over by SCADTA — a fair measure of how far the conversion belonged to ordinary use of the type rather than to a separate factory version.