Fokker

~ the last words ~

The last propeller airliner Turkish Airlines flew in scheduled service was a Fokker, and the jet that replaced it was also a Fokker. THY swapped its F-27 Friendships for F-28 Fellowships across 1972 and 1973 and went all-jet on the transaction. One of those Fellowships, TC-JAT, named Trabzon, came in from Samsun on 23 December 1979 and drifted off the localizer in severe turbulence. It hit a hillside near Kuyumcuköy about 32 kilometers short of Esenboğa. Forty-one people died and four walked away. When the A310s arrived in 1985 the surviving F-28s went to Boğaziçi Hava Taşımacılığı, which is the ordinary fate of an aircraft that has been outgrown rather than disgraced.

Anthony Fokker was twenty-two and Dutch and living in Germany when he registered his company on 22 February 1912. Three years later he was supplying the German air service with the Eindecker, whose interrupter gear let a machine gun fire through the propeller arc, and the resulting six months of one-sided air combat got its own name in English. The Dr.I triplane is the aircraft Manfred von Richthofen died in. The D.VII was the only aircraft named in the Armistice as something the Germans had to hand over by type. Fokker took machinery and parts across the border into the Netherlands in 1919 and started again there, and the F.VII trimotor of the twenties carried an Australian crew across the Pacific and a Norwegian one over the North Pole.

The postwar company was a competent builder of small airliners for operators who did not need big ones. The F-27 Friendship of 1955 sold around 800 units and was the best-selling Western turboprop of its generation. The F-28 Fellowship put a small jet into the same niche and ran to 241 airframes before production stopped in 1987. The last generation was the Fokker 50 turboprop with the 70 and the 100 alongside it, all of them good aircraft in a segment that by the late eighties had Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier and Embraer looking at it.

~ the record ~

~ the german parent ~

Daimler-Benz Aerospace took a majority holding in 1993, which at the time read as the Dutch company finally getting a balance sheet behind it. The Fokker 100 was selling into the American market and the Fokker 70 was arriving. What the parent found instead was a cost base built for a much larger production run and an order book that would not fill it, and the guilder was strengthening against the dollar that every airliner is priced in.

The Daimler-Benz board cut ties on 22 January 1996. That started a rescue clock rather than stopping one: negotiations ran with Bombardier through early February, and AVIC of China and Samsung of South Korea were both named as possible buyers into March. None of it closed. On 15 March the court declared the company bankrupt.

~ what stayed in the air ~

The last Fokker 70 was delivered in April 1997, assembled out of parts that were already on the floor when the receivers arrived. Forty-seven of them were built. The Fokker 100 finished at 283. The main assembly hall at Schiphol closed behind them and around 4,700 people lost their jobs, with 350 kept on only long enough to finish what could be finished.

The pieces did not all die. Manufacturing and maintenance went to Stork and traded as Fokker Technologies, which GKN bought in 2015. The space division became Fokker Space, then Dutch Space, then part of EADS in 2006. Panta Holdings picked up Fokker Services and Fokker Techniek in 2021, and a separate outfit called Fokker Next Gen is currently designing a hydrogen airliner on the strength of the name.

None of that is the company. The thing that ended on 15 March 1996 was a place in the Netherlands where complete aircraft were designed and built under that name, and no complete aircraft has been built under it since. What survives is a parts supplier and a maintenance shop wearing the badge, and between them they employ people and make money and have never rolled anything out of a door on its own wheels.

~ the fleet that outlived the builder ~

Fokker 100s stayed in commercial service for a quarter of a century after the company that made them stopped existing, mostly with Australian charter operators flying mining crews to the pits and with Iranian carriers who could not legally buy anything newer. Alliance Airlines in Queensland bought 21 airframes off Austrian Airlines in December 2015, not because it needed 21 aircraft but because it needed the engines and the spares inside them, and it is now the largest Fokker operator on earth as well as the largest supplier of Fokker parts outside the company that no longer exists.

That is the quiet part of an aircraft manufacturer's death. The product does not disappear on the day the company does. It just stops being supported, and then somebody has to keep it flying out of a warehouse of secondhand parts until the economics finally refuse.

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