Junkers W 33
The Junkers W 33 was a German single-engined all-metal transport monoplane of the 1920s, developed from the Junkers F 13 airliner and powered by a Junkers L5 inline engine. Built at Dessau from 1927 to 1934, with a few assembled in Sweden and the Soviet Union, it worked as a transport and mailplane for operators in many countries and set world endurance and distance records in 1927. One aircraft, the Bremen, made the first east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic by aeroplane, flying from Ireland to Canada in April 1928 against the prevailing winds; it is now displayed at Bremen Airport.
Why It Mattered
The W 33 was a factory-built production transport, not a machine built for a single record attempt, yet one of them was the first aeroplane to fly the Atlantic from east to west. Flying west meant flying into the prevailing winds, the reason every earlier heavier-than-air crossing had taken the easier direction, from America toward Europe. Eleven months after Lindbergh's solo crossing to Paris, the Bremen's flight answered it from the opposite direction. The type had already set world endurance and distance records in 1927, before the crossing was attempted. Away from the record flights, W 33s spent the late 1920s and 1930s working as transports and mailplanes for operators across the world.
Design Notes
The W 33 was developed from the Junkers F 13 airliner of 1919, keeping its span but with a squarer cabin arranged for freight and a door on the port side. The structure was Junkers' standard one for the period, an aluminium-alloy tube frame covered with corrugated duralumin skin. The wing was a cantilever, needing no bracing struts, at a time when most aeroplanes still had them. Power came from one Junkers L5 engine, a six-cylinder water-cooled inline of 228 kW (306 hp) also used in the late F 13. Customers could have wheels or floats as needed, and the prototype made its first flight on floats, from the Elbe near Dessau, on 17 June 1926.
Operational History
Production ran from 1927 to 1934, most of it at Dessau, with small numbers assembled at Limhamn in Sweden and at Fili, near Moscow. A month after the Bremen left the Dessau works in July 1927, a first attempt set out from Dessau; its crew became disoriented in fog and headwinds and turned back, and the second machine, the Europa, never got out of Germany. The second attempt staged through Ireland, where the crew waited out seventeen rain-soaked days at Baldonnel before taking off on 12 April 1928: Hermann Köhl, Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld and the Irish commander James Fitzmaurice. Their compass failed, an oil line leaked, and thirty hours in they were lost and running low on fuel. On Friday 13 April they landed on the frozen reservoir of Greenly Island, in Quebec, where the ice broke beneath the aeroplane and bent its propeller and undercarriage. In everyday service the type worked as a transport and mailplane; Deutsche Luft Hansa, for one, flew four of them on mail duties from 1929. Other W 33s flew survey and crop-spraying work, and the Luftwaffe later used some as trainers alongside the W 34. Sweden's air force flew one W 33 as an air ambulance in the mid-1930s and, after the Second World War, as a utility transport that took part in the search during the 1952 Catalina affair.
Afterlife
The Bremen did not fly again after Greenly Island. Von Hünefeld bequeathed it to the Museum of the City of New York, which loaned it to the Smithsonian in December 1930. The city museum then passed title to Henry Ford's museum complex in Dearborn, Michigan, which displayed the aeroplane for 61 years. In 1998 it crossed the Atlantic once more, on permanent loan to its namesake city, restored under Lufthansa supervision, and it now rests in the exhibition hangar at Bremen Airport. Aviation historian Paul Zöller has observed that the Deutsches Museum's refusal probably saved the aircraft, since the Munich museum was bombed in 1944.