Anton Flettner
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Anton Flettner (November 1, 1885 in Eddersheim (today a district of Hattersheim am Main) – December 29, 1961) was a German aviation engineer and inventor. He made important contributions to airplane and helicopter design.
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[edit] World War I
During World War I, Flettner developed a device allowing to raise or lower a plane's nose for better control, today known as the "trim tab".
Following World War I, Flettner directed an aeronautical and hydrodynamic research institute in Amsterdam.
In the 1920s, he bought a schooner and added two rotating 50-foot cylinders onto it, and thus was the first to build a propulsion system based on the Magnus effect. The ship was named Baden-Baden and crossed the Atlantic in 1926. It could outsail normal schooners under moderate to heavy winds, but was finally destroyed by a storm in 1931. A commercial ship, The Barbara, was also built and sailed to the U.S.
[edit] World War II
During World War II, he headed the Flettner Aircraft Corporation which specialized in helicopters.
Anton Flettner was also noted for his invention of the famous Flettner rotary ventilator, widely used on buses, vans, boats, campervans and trucks to assist cooling without the use of energy - modern derivatives of his ventilator are still manufactured in Britain by Flettner Ventilator Limited. The helicopter invention was accomplished from his wealth from the ventilator business, whose success also depended on the skill of his wife, Lydia Freudenberg Flettner. Although Anton Flettner built his helicopters for the German military, primarily for navy spotter use, his wife was Jewish. He held a personal relationship with Himmler who in turn had a lower ranked officer and his men escort her family safely to Sweden for the duration of WWII. His partner and confidant was Dr. Kurt Hohenemser, a brilliant and thorough engineer from whom the details necessary for the helicopter's success was derived. Dr. Hohenemser's father was also Jewish, yet the pair remained unharmed during their tenure together throughout the war as they worked to develop the helicoptor for military use.
While the final product, the Kolibri FL282 (Kolibri means Hummingbird) was able to be factory assembled, Flettner and Hohenemser insisted that they were the only ones who were capable to assemble the complex intermeshing rotor gearbox assembly. This bottleneck in production kept the FL282 from ever gaining a serious military role.
[edit] After the Wars
After 1945, Flettner (along with many other aviation pioneers) moved to America, where he started a new Flettner Aircraft Corporation which developed helicopters for the U.S. military. Flettner's company in the US was not commercially successful, but his work was shared with the Army Air Corp. Many of the Flettner designs are found in Kaman helicopters of later years. Flettner died at 76 years of age in New York City on December 29, 1961.
[edit] External links
[edit] See also
- Flettner Fl 184 helicopter-gyroplane hybrid
- Autogyros
- Gyrodynes and Heliplanes
- Flettner Ventilator
