Model airplane auction - ends Sunday

[uwe]

Oh come on Scott, the only thing where the FW 200 Condor ever spectacularly bombed was in its own performance as a warbird! As a civil aviation construction it was pretty much unfit for any wartime use for a myriad of reasons - transporting the Führer and some light reconnaissance duties looking for Allied ship convoys excepted.

It looked good, yes, and had a decent range,



but its flaws were legendary/notorious:

- general structural weakness, a lot of them broke in two pieces when landing was rough,

- the conical fuselage made for great aerodynamics, but could not carry even a single bomb weighing more than 250 kilos (and that couldn't even be placed in the middle where a large structural seam was running along the fuselage, but only to the side of that seam, creating an imbalance making handling difficult), it had to carry bombs on exterior mounts under its likewise not very stable wings,

- no bomb bay could be fitted due to the low wing cantilever design - with a bomb bay its wings would have simply fallen off,

- no self-sealing fuel tanks,

- landing-gear not fit for anything but paved runaways,

- bad view for the crew (just great for reconnaissance work ...),

- it was essentially a one-piece plane, wings could not be dismounted at any specific place, but only sheared off, making repairs on front line airstrips impossible, the plane had to be transported to specialized facilities in the rear,

- no armor for the engines and very little for the crew,

- the bomb sights were inaccurate to the point of being useless, forcing the giant plane to make dangerous low-level attacks for potential hits where its performance became lumbering at best, making it an easy target for ship-based antiaircraft guns,

- the plane was severely underarmed (the conical fuselage made installing turrets and gun bays difficult), yet what little self-defense it had hampered its (in its civil version very good) aerodynamics greatly - consequently, FW 200 crews were under orders to avoid any combat with Allied planes and make a run for it when encountering them! So that old AIRFIX picture of a Short Sunderland shooting down a Condor was not without merit - at that height and poorly armed as it was, the Condor wouldn't have stood a chance against the Coastal Command's 'Flying Porcupine'.

*********

Not a high point of German engineering then or: Don't try to convert a passenger plane (only 30 passengers) built for long range comfort and little fuel consumption due to great aerodynamics into a war plane for lack of any other four engine plane in your arsenal!

PS: The countless structural and design weaknesses of the FW 200 Condor had one great advantage which, alas!, remained unfortunately unrealized: Had that explosive device gone off in March 1943 (two months after the Sixth Army had surrendered at Stalingrad) which one of the Wehrmacht conspirators, Fabian von Schlabrendorff,



smuggled into Adolf's personal FW 200,



even the Führer's custom built rescue seat could not have saved him. The Condor (on its way back from the Russian front line) would have been blown apart to bits and pieces over Kiev had everything gone as planned. But trust the Brits to make a mess of it: The (Brit-produced) acid-based ignition timer did not set off at the height the Condor flew and at the temperatures of the storage department where it was stashed away. The best-laid plans ...

BTW: One of FvS's sons, also called Fabian, was the partner responsible for me as an associate at the beginning of my law firm career. I learned a lot from him, an extremely smart man (he is still alive and practicing), though he would regularly mildly chastise me with "You're style is very journalistic, Herr Hornung, we are not writing for DER SPIEGEL here ..." (DER SPIEGEL being a German investigative journalism weekly similar to TIME magazine). 

[godofthunder]

   I know all to well the Condors flaws. But it is a beautiful aircraft imho. What about the Arado 234 easily one of the most beautiful bombers Germany produced. 

[uwe]

Ahead of its time, no doubt, and a neat design.



But perhaps not so much a real strategic bomber as a multi-purpose aircraft kind of like the Junkers 88.



The bomber version had no bomb bay capability either, bombs on exterior mounts - which on a jet plane meant to be aerodynamic is self-defeating. All those creative end phase designs of the Third Reich had something makeshift about them. In ten years (since the need was first seen), German aviation industry was unable to design and lead to full-scale production a single standard strategic bomber model (in part under the - through later WW II bomb aim progress refuted - misconception that accurate high altitude bombing would never be possible). It got to a point where reverse engineering of captured B-17s was seriously envisaged - how embarrassing is that (with all due respect to the engineering behind the B-17 which was a mighty fine and reliable plane, especially in comparison to the B-24 Liberator and its predetermined break-off shoulder wings).

[TBird1958]

Beautiful yet impractical design, isn't that more of an Italian thing?

Just give me a B-26, I love the whore from Baltimore!

[uwe]

The Condor was ahead of its time as a civil airliner, but it was never designed or intended to serve a military purpose.