Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor
The Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor was a German four-engined aircraft that began as a Deutsche Luft Hansa airliner and became the Luftwaffe's long-range maritime patrol bomber. First flown on 27 July 1937, it made the first nonstop heavier-than-air flight from Berlin to New York in August 1938. Converted for war, it hunted Allied convoys across the Atlantic in 1940–41 before Allied fighters and escort carriers ended its ascendancy; by late 1943 it served mainly as a transport. Focke-Wulf built 276 between 1937 and 1944. A single complete aircraft, reconstructed from fjord-salvaged wreckage, is displayed at Berlin Tempelhof.
Why It Mattered
The Fw 200 Condor was a German airliner that the Luftwaffe turned into its long-range maritime patrol and anti-shipping aircraft of the early Second World War. In August 1938, before the war, the prototype had flown nonstop from Berlin to New York, the first heavier-than-air aircraft to make that crossing without a stop. From 1940 its crews ranged across the North Sea and the Atlantic, reporting convoys to the Kriegsmarine's U-boats and attacking shipping themselves. Winston Churchill called the type the "Scourge of the Atlantic", the name by which it is still best known. Production ran from 1937 to 1944 and totalled 276 aircraft.
Design Notes
Kurt Tank of Focke-Wulf proposed the Fw 200 to Deutsche Luft Hansa as a landplane that could carry passengers across the Atlantic, at a time when airlines usually crossed long over-water routes with seaplanes. Luft Hansa issued its specification in June 1936, and the first prototype flew on 27 July 1937 with Tank at the controls. The result was an all-metal, four-engined low-wing monoplane seating up to 26 passengers in two cabins. The first prototype flew with American Pratt & Whitney Hornet radials; the following prototypes used German BMW 132 engines instead. The military version grew out of a Japanese Navy request for a patrol aircraft; the Luftwaffe's adaptation added bomb hardpoints, dorsal gun positions and a ventral gondola whose central bay usually held extra fuel. The airliner's structure had not been designed for that extra weight, and several early aircraft broke up while landing; later models were strengthened. Late-war versions carried Lorenz FuG 200 Hohentwiel search radar in the nose, and from 1943 some could launch the Henschel Hs 293 guided anti-ship missile.
Operational History
Civil Condors entered service with Deutsche Luft Hansa, Denmark's Det Danske Luftfartselskab and Brazil's Syndicato Condor, and the war prevented further civil orders from being filled. The first prototype, fitted with extra fuel and designated Fw 200 S-1, flew from Berlin to New York on 10–11 August 1938 in 24 hours 56 minutes, and returned in 19 hours 47 minutes. From 28 November 1938 the same aircraft flew from Berlin to Tokyo by way of Basra, Karachi and Hanoi. Armed sorties began on 8 April 1940, and after France fell the type worked the Atlantic from French bases, searching for convoys and warships to report for U-boat attack and carrying a bomb load of about 1,000 kilograms against shipping. It was claimed at the time that Condors sank 331,122 tonnes of shipping between June 1940 and February 1941, in attacks pressed home at extremely low altitude with a crude bombsight. From mid-1941 the crews were ordered to stop attacking shipping and avoid combat to preserve numbers, as RAF Coastal Command patrols, CAM-ship Hurricanes and carrier fighters made the low-level attacks costly. Martlets from the first escort carrier, HMS Audacity, shot down seven Condors while escorting three convoys in the last months of 1941. On 14 August 1942 an Fw 200C-3 shot down over Iceland was the first German aircraft destroyed by USAAF pilots. The type flew supply missions into Stalingrad in 1943, and by the latter half of that year the Luftwaffe was using it almost exclusively as a transport.
Afterlife
No complete original Condor survived; the one complete aircraft that exists today is a reconstruction built around salvaged wreckage, displayed at Berlin Tempelhof Airport. Its core airframe, a military Fw 200 that ditched in Norway's Trondheim Fjord in February 1942, sank to a depth of about 60 metres. It was raised on 26 May 1999, but the corroded airframe disintegrated as it was lowered onto the recovery platform. The remains went to Airbus at Bremen, where the aircraft spent 22 years being rebuilt. Wings from a second wreck on the Kvitanosi mountain near Voss completed it, recovered after a 2008 compromise left the parts not needed on the mountain as a memorial. The finished aircraft was taken apart in June 2021, moved to Berlin and reassembled in Hangar 7 at the former Tempelhof Airport as an exhibit.