Talk:Fokker F-11
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Researching the Fokker F.11
editI am sorry that I did not have more books and could only afford to buy Johnson for this page.
The F.11 was a failure and failures are usually hard to research. I found it while researching it's designer Alfred Gassner. It was not his masterpiece which arguably is either the Fairchild F. 91, which was Gar Woods replacement "Air Yacht" when he traded up from the F.11A, or the Ju 88 which he was a primary designer of. My method of research was the usual one. I vacuumed up every bit of data I could find and bought a book, Johnson, E. R., American flying boats and amphibious aircraft and studied what I had.
Eventually a pattern appeared and led to pursuing leads which the research produced, such as the fascinating Harold Vanderbilt. As usual the sources provided few if any citations. All had errors, for example Johnson, American flying boats and amphibious aircraft, states "The F-11 Flying Yacht combined the all-metal, cantilevered wing of a Fokker F-14 parasol landplane transport (Army Y1C-14) with an entirely new all metal boat hull designed by Alfred A. Gassner who worked for Fokker (later General Aviation) from 1928 to 1931."
The problem is that, except for the corrugated duralumin fuselage decking, the Fokker F.14 (not F-14) was of standard Fokker construction. The wing was all wood. http://aviastar.org/air/holland/fokker_f-14.php http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/Braas/10261.htm Peter Bowers makes the argument the F.14 (ATC 234) actually used the wing of the F.11A (ATC 222, 2-163). http://www.aeroresourcesinc.com/uploads/197808-1929%20Fokker%20F-14.pdf
Following the research phase came the work of comparing, further research to resolve questions raised, and finally writing the article.
My access to the NY Times and Aviation Week archives was a great help, alas the American Aviation Historical Society archives article on the airplane has not been digitized.
Without grubbing around in factory archives (if they exist) and lots of time checking into vanished magazines and newspapers this is probably the best that may be done.
Mark Lincoln (talk) 23:07, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
- Just a small quibble about designations, tangential to the above comment's main point: in this comment, Mark Lincoln refers repeatedly to the "F.11", "F.11A", and "F.14", and even explicitly says "F.14 (not F-14)". But the reverse is true: all of these were U.S. Fokker aircraft, designated with a dash separator, not a decimal point. In fact, only hours after he last edited the preceding comment, it seems he came to the same conclusion, because he made this edit to the main article with the summary, "Found solid evidence that the proper nomenclature was Type-decimal-roman numeral for Dutch aircraft while it was type-dash-arabic numerals for US aircraft".
- (Apologies for going on about this in several different places, but it does seem to have caused different types of Fokkers to be confused on a number of occassions.)