Junkers Ju 52 CASA 352L

The CASA 352L was the final form taken by Junkers Ju 52/3m production, and the longest-serving in military hands. Construcciones Aeronáuticas S.A. (CASA) acquired the licence for the German trimotor in 1942, and the first Spanish-built example flew in 1944. Between the closing phase of the Second World War and the post-war years the company delivered 170 aircraft in two series. The first, designated CASA 352, amounted to 106 aircraft and used the German BMW 132 radial. When that engine went out of production, CASA turned to the Beta built in Spain by Elizalde (ENMASA, later ENMA), itself a licence-built BMW 132: the result was the CASA 352L, of which 64 were built. The most visible external change was a new cowling for the centre engine to suit the Spanish powerplant; the airframe, corrugated skin and cabin layout remained those of the transport Ju 52/3m. Sources disagree on the exact engine designation: the usual variant list gives the 578 kW (775 hp) ENMA Beta B-4, while others name the 750 hp ENMASA Beta E9C. Production did not end until 1954.

In the Spanish Air Force (Ejército del Aire) the aircraft received the military designation T.2, and individual machines carried serials in the T.2B series. For a decade it was the backbone of Spanish military air transport while American equipment was awaited. Transport Wing No. 35 (Ala 35), formed on 1 July 1955 at Getafe air base, took the CASA 352L as its very first aircraft: it received more than twenty in its early days and used them as its main equipment until 1960. In the late 1950s, by then technically obsolete, the type served alongside Douglas C-47s in the wing and kept flying intensively, logging 15,500 flight hours with Ala 35 before the arrival of C-54s and, from 1963, CASA C-207 Azors.

Its best-remembered role was as the paratroopers' aircraft. On 23 February 1954 the Spanish Army's first paratroopers, from the newly formed First Parachute Infantry Bandera Roger de Flor, made their first jump at the Méndez Parada Military Parachute School at Alcantarilla (Murcia) from a CASA 352 and a Savoia S-81. In the following years the CASA trimotors became the workhorses of those units and proved decisive in the Ifni War: in 1957 they carried out the first combat jump, at Tiluin, and in February of the following year the Erkunt drop in the defence of Sidi Ifni. The Alcantarilla school kept jumping from them for many years, and it was there that the type's worst accident in Spain occurred: on 8 June 1965, within a formation of nine aircraft dropping paratroopers, T.2B-229 and T.2B-230 collided, killing all six crew of both aircraft and eight paratroopers. On 27 July 1971 T.2B-198 was written off, the last hull loss of any Ju 52 or derivative in regular air force or airline service. The Spanish Air Force retired the type in 1974; some examples also flew in Portugal.

The mass retirement made the CASA 352L the main source of "Ju 52s" for museums and heritage flight operators worldwide, since very few original German aircraft remained airworthy. In Spain, T.2B-211 and T.2B-254 are preserved at the Museo del Aire at Cuatro Vientos, and T.2B-246, coded 35-131, spent years deteriorating in the open at Torrejón: dismantled and moved to Getafe, it was restored by Ala 35's maintenance group between 2014 and 2016, with original corrugated skin sections supplied by the Museo del Aire, and now stands as a monument on the base's main avenue. Abroad, T.2B-273 flies with the South African Airways Museum Society at Germiston, bought from England in 1981 to mark the 50th anniversary of South African Airways; T.2B-176, built in 1949, reached the United States in 1980 with the Confederate (now Commemorative) Air Force, which bought it from the Spanish government and ferried it across the Atlantic in several stages, and since 2010 it has been flown by the Military Aviation Museum at Virginia Beach, re-engined with Pratt & Whitney R-1340s and three-blade propellers. Static examples are on show in Germany (Hermeskeil, Sinsheim, Munich, Speyer), Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada (T.2B-148 in Winnipeg, converted to resemble a Ju 52/1m) and the United States: T.2B-244 was donated by Spain to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in 1971, and T.2B-255 is at the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Switzerland's Ju-Air is restoring T.2B-165, formerly displayed at Düsseldorf Airport as D-CIAK. The Spanish Army's parachute brigade (BRIPAC), unable to obtain a genuine example because the few survivors remain with the Air and Space Force, unveiled in 2025 a partial corrugated-metal replica bearing the number 721, recalling the 721st Squadron of the Alcantarilla school.