Junkers F 13 Junkers-Larsen JL-6

In November 1919 Junkers and John M. Larsen signed a cooperation agreement covering final assembly and sales of the F 13 in the United States. Aircraft arrived crated from Dessau and were put together in New York as the JL-6. Beyond the commercial value, it was for Junkers the one workable route to selling aeroplanes while the Allied powers restricted German aviation manufacturing.

The main customer was the United States Post Office Department, which put JL-6s on the scheduled New York–Chicago–Omaha run, later extended to San Francisco. The operation showed what the aircraft could do, but it was marked by a run of accidents blamed largely on American pilots' inexperience with monoplanes and on unauthorised 'improvements' introduced during assembly. The service's first pilot, Max Miller, was killed in September 1920 when his JL-6 caught fire and crashed at Morristown.

Larsen ran a long series of demonstration flights. On one of them Eddie Stinson and Lloyd Bertaud took off from Mineola, New York, in a BMW IIIa-powered JL-6 and stayed aloft for 26 hours, 5 minutes and 32 seconds, a world endurance record.

The Junkers-Larsen Corporation helped Hugo Junkers and his aeroplane through their leanest years. Alongside the civil machines, two JL-6s on floats went to the United States Navy — and it was this version, rather than the European F 13, whose outward appearance the modern replica of 2016 reproduces.