Willy Messerschmitt
Professor Willy Messerschmitt, constructor and scientist, aircraft builder and businessman, was a pioneer from the time of the first beginnings of aviation developmentat the beginning of the century. He was born June 26, 1898, in Frankfurt am Main, as the son of the businessman Ferdinand Messerschmitt and his wife Maria, born Schaller. He spent his youth together with four brothers and sisters in Bamberg/Oberfranken, for the most part, where the family Messerschmitt had been highly regarded businessmen and commercial enterpreneurs for many generations.
Already as a school child, Willy Messerschmitt was very interested in the beginnings of aviation. He read everything he could find, drew, built models which could fly. In the year 1913, he joined the local glider pioneer Friedrich Harth, who was employed as the governmental construction supervisor of the city of Bamberg and who built and tested gliders during his free time with his small group of aides. The aircraft testing grounds were first located at "Ludwager Kulm," a flat hill in the vicinity of Bamberg, where young Messerschmitt performed his first equilibrium exercises and sliding exercises.
However, the fifteen-year-old was more interested in the technical improvement of the aircraft, and he became an enthusiastic aide to Harth, who was eighteen years older. Soon he became his most important partner and made drawings and worked in the workshop. The aircraft test grounds of the Kulm became more and more limited as the flight paths became longer. Therefore, a new test area was found at Heidelstein in the Rhön. In the early spring of 1914, Harth constructed a test building and at the end of July they brought a new aircraft S 4 to Rhön.
The outbreak of the Great War prevented any more testing. Harth and his older helpers had to go to the front. When Messerschmitt went back to Rhoen the next spring, he found the building broken into and the aircraft destroyed. Harth had hoped to be able to use his leave from the front for test flights. Therefore, Messerschmitt started to build his first aircraft by himself according to drawings and written instructions of Harth at part of the family estate in Bamberg. This was the "wing control glider-type Harth-Messerschmitt 5." He was able to bring the aircraft to the Heidelstein test area at the time of a front leave by Harth in August/September 1915. It was then possible to resume the flight tests which had been interrupted since the winter of 1913/14.
Satisfactory results were obtained with a new aircraft which had an increased wing area and a lower flight weight, the glider S 6. In August of 1916, it was tested at the same location. Flights up to three and one-half minutes duration were achieved on the flat test area of Heidelstein when the take-off points were slightly raised. In 1917, Messerschmitt obtained his matura degree in Nurnberg. He was now capable of using all of his time to study aeronautics in depth and to make further improvements to their wing-controlled gliders, together with Harth. Because he was called into active duty during the war and because of difficult conditions, no systematic progress could be made.
Between wars, German aerodynamicists and engineers, prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles from building airplanes of more than 100 horsepower, turned to gliders to learn valuable lessons in aerodynamic structure that later benefrtted German aircraft design (Winter, Byshyn, and Clark, 1969). Germany also continued its collaborative work with Fokker and established firms to work on aircraft in other countries. Thus, in 1925, when finally permitted to conduct passenger operation, Germany was the only country with new generation aircraft; other European nations had concentrated on converting military airplanes into commercial planes. Once the treaty restrictions were dropped, Germany's aviation industry became a thinly disguised military machine.
Aviation pioneer Willy Messerschmitt was a designer who produced trailblazing work from gliding to supersonic flight. Willy Messerschmitt shaped the development of aviation. In addition to numerous trendsetting technological developments in aircraft construction, both he as an individual and the name of Messerschmitt are also associated with the development and production of aircraft in the Second World War, and the use of forced laborers. The name Willy Messerschmitt is also connected to a dark side - the purpose served by the aircraft produced during the Second World War and slave laborers were used to build them.
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