Anton Flettner

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Anton Flettner at his boyhood home

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.

1 World War I
2 World War II
3 Photo gallery
4 Postwar
5 External links
6 See also

[edit] World War I

During World War I, Flettner developed 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. He came upon the idea while at the beach with his wife. He used sand, flowing over his rotating hand, to describe the Magnus Effect and realized its potential on sail propulsion. 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 United States.

[edit] World War II

During World War II, he headed Anton Flettner, Flugzeugbau GmbH, 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 concept of this ventilator may have been inspired by the work of a Finnish engineer, S.J. Savonius but there is no known evidence of this coincidence.

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 World War II. His partner and confidant was Dr. Kurt Hohenemser, a brilliant and thorough engineer who developed the details necessary for the helicopter's success. 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 helicopter for military use.

While the final product, the Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri ("Hummingbird"), could be factory-assembled, Flettner and Hohenemser insisted that they were the only ones who were capable of assembling the complex intermeshing rotor gearbox assembly. This bottleneck in production kept the FL282 from ever gaining a serious military role.

[edit] Photo gallery

Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri helicopter

Letter from Dr. Hohenemser regarding his association with Anton Flettner (page 1 of 2)

Letter from Dr. Hohenemser regarding his association with Anton Flettner (page 2 of 2)

[edit] Postwar

Flettner meets Wernher von Braun

Upon the war's conclusion, Anton Flettner was held in a military holding camp in Kransberg. According to his partner, Dr. Kurt Hohenemser, Anton Flettner was of "the first regular German immigrants after the war". After 1945, Flettner, along with many other aviation pioneers, moved to the United States, where he started Flettner Aircraft Corporation, which developed helicopters for the U.S. military. Flettner's company in the U.S. was not commercially successful, but his work was shared with the Army Air Corps. Many of the Flettner designs are found in Kaman helicopters of later years. Flettner died at age 76 in New York City on December 29, 1961.