Fokker - Cold War Era
The company rose from its ashes in 1945 and a nucleus of Fokker employees began design and production of a series of small military trainers, the S.11, S.12, S.13 and S.14 Mach Trainer, the company's first jet design. In 1951, the company moved to a new factory erected at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, where several hundreds of Hawker Sea Furies, followed later by Gloster Meteor and Hawker Hunter jet fighters built under licence. In the sixties, Fokker produced 350 Lockheed Starfighters, wing center sections of the Breguet Atlantic military patrol aircraft and center-fuselages of the Northrop NF-5.
By the early fifties, the company was preparing for a re-entry into the civil airliner market. This led to the introduction of the Fokker F27 Friendship in 1958. The F27 has become the world's best selling turboprop airliner. When production ended in 1986, a total of 786 Friendships had been sold worldwide.
Germany was not ahowed to engage in aeronautical R&D after World War II until 1955. Shortly thereafter, several companies, many family-owned, returned to aircraft manufacturing. By 1969, mergers had reduced the number of German airframe and engine companies from 20 to 4: 3 airframe companies - Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm (MBB), Dornier, and the German-Dutch Vereinigte Flugtechnische Werke (VFW)-Fokker; and a single aeroengine company - Motoren und Turbinen Union (MTU). VFW broke with Fokker in 1979 and merged with MBB in the late 1980s.
Fokker developed the 65 passenger Fellowship F-28 small jet aircraft in the mid 1960s, and continued production until 1986. It was a successor to the F-27 propeller aircraft. The jet received FAA certification in March 1969. Like today's regional jets, it was designed with the short-haul regional passenger in mind, able to operate on 4,000-foot runways and cruise at 530 mph with a range of 1,150 miles. It was low to the ground, with a built-in staircase, and waist-high cargo hatches, allowing for quick loading and unloading of passengers and cargo. By 1979 more than 150 F-28s had been sold worldwide, but none to U.S. airlines. With the new opportunities created by deregulation in 1978, two U.S. carriers, Altair and Empire, placed orders for advanced models of the F-28 with U.S. service beginning in 1980. After Altair's bankruptcy, Empire acquired its Fokkers and in 1986, after Empire and Piedmont merged, Piedmont became the world's largest operator of F-28s with 45. These were all incorporated into the US Air fleet in 1989. The F-100, with a range of 1,300 nm, was launched in 1983 and entered service in the mid 1980s, as the successor to the original F-28 Fellowship.
Although it held close to half the capital shares of SABCA [Belgian Aeronautical Construction Corporation], Fokker did not play an active role on the Belgian front. Their ties might perhaps have taken on new dimensions if the MDF-100 150-passenger airliner project had materialized, since SABCA was actively involved with it. Other opportunities to strengthen relations between the two firms were therefore awaited. All of which meanwhile did not alter the very good relations between Belgium and the Netherlands. There was certainly no basis for thinking that the abandonment of the MDF-100 would be a hard blow to the Dutch builder: Its highly diversified activities, which were well distributed between the civil and military sectors, enabled it to view the medium-term future with undisturbed serenity. With 9,500 employees on its payroll and an annual turnover that had passed the 1-billion-florin mark, a substantial financial balance was confirmed by the figures for its 1981 operations, and a distinctive image that conveys an abundant sense of dynamism, it can afford to take the time needed for reflection and toprepare a new strategy for the future, that is, other choices.
The F-16 work for Stork Fokker started in 1975 when the aircraft was purchased by the Dutch Government. The F-16 from Lockheed Martin entered service at the Royal Dutch Air force in 1979. Because of its larger size than that of the two Belgian aircraft manufacturers, Fokker was not in a position of dependence upon the compensation contracts that were tied to the General Dynamics F-16 multinational program. This program represented hardly more than 20 percent of Fokker's total annual turnover and some 1,200 jobs. The 100th American fighter plane assembled at Schiphol was delivered during June 1982, a chronological checkpoint confirming that the original schedule was being met.
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