Sunday 23 January 2022

Focke-Achgelis Fa 269 - Kurzstarter mit Kipprotoren Flieger Revue X serie

 

Spectacular Arkadiusz Wróbel box art on the Amusing Hobby 48th scale Weserflug P.1003/Fa 269 48th scale kit and now on the front cover of the latest issue of Flieger Revue X. Part 4 of the X-series, this issue (No 93)  covers the Focke-Achgelis Fa 269. The Fa 269 - the so-called 'Nazi tilt - rotor' - was a single-seat fighter converti-plane project resulting from a design study order issued by the RLM to Focke-Achgelis in 1941 which called for a point defence fighter combining the VTOL capabilities of the helicopter with the speed and economy of a conventional fixed-wing aircraft..







" ...In 1934, Dr Adolf Rohrbach sold his own aircraft factory, founded in 1922, which was then merged with Weser Flugzeugbau in Bremen. Here Rohrbach became technical director. He had successfully designed flying boats in the years before and now continued this work with the small flying amphibian Weser We 271. However, the idea of a vertical take-off aircraft had not left him. The vane-bladed 'wheel' aircraft now seemed too complicated to him. In 1938, together with Dipl.-Ing. Adolf Simon, he designed an aircraft whose two large propellers could be swivelled upwards. This meant that they worked like lifting screws. At a safe flight altitude, the propellers then swung into the normal flight position and the aircraft could continue at high speed. The propellers of Weser project P.1003 were to be driven by a single in-line motor in the fuselage via transmission shafts. A radiator for the motor was to be located directly under the nose of the fuselage. Since the propeller airflow after pivoting would hit the wing destroying part of the lift, Adolf Simon came up with the solution of pivoting the outer parts of the wing at the same time. Although the fuselage and wing design was very neatly executed, a top speed of 650 km/h was over-optimistically expected for a very large single-engine aircraft. In May 1938, Weser Flugzeugbau filed a patent for an "aircraft with jointly pivoting wing and tailplane" (No. 711216). At that time, Weser had also thought about other applications of a pivoting wing. However, a patent application for the revolutionary aircraft design with pivoting wing and propeller can neither be found under Weser Flugzeugbau, nor for Adolf Rohrbach or Adolf Simon..."



Amusing Hobby 48th scale Weserflug P.1003 kit review