Word: fokker
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...knot motor yacht Q. E. D., streamlined startler designed by and built for Dutch Airman Anthony Herman Gerard Fokker in his slickest airflow style, sank in the Hudson River near Yonkers, N. Y. Honeymooning on the borrowed boat were a bride and groom of five hours, friends of Fokker, when a fire started in an ornamental fireplace in an after cabin, spread quickly, driving honeymooners and crew overboard. At the launching a year ago, Designer Fokker mused: "I hope it will be obsolete within two years. . . . That is good. That is progress. Today there are too many yachts that outlive...
...week at Santa Monica, Calif., Douglas Aircraft Co. test-flew a new ship, turned its back on the design trend which in the past five years has put low-wing monoplanes on every large domestic airline in the U. S. Not since the last famed Ford "tin goose" and Fokker tri-motor disappeared from service had a high-wing monoplane like Douglas' new DC-5, which carries 16 passengers and uses a retractable tricycle landing gear, been offered for transport service...
...Tony Fokker might have gone on to explain that he had his eye on a shipbuilding business to replace a U. S. aircraft career that ended when the Department of Commerce grounded his transport planes after the mysterious Rockne crash (TIME, April 6, 1931). But at that point a telephone extension buzzed. He caught up the receiver. From across 3,500 miles of sea came a familiar voice. "Hello, momma," boomed Fokker happily, and in mingled English and Dutch described to his mother in Holland the scene on New York City's Harlem...
Presently he replaced the instrument. A bell rang aboard the Q. E. D. Mother Fokker's call had been the launching signal. A wicker-jacketed bottle of Zuyder Zee water burst against the yacht's bow, workmen knocked away the keel blocks, loosed the hawsers, and the Q. E. D. started down the ways. But before more than a few feet of her hull had entered the water, she came to a dead stop. Her stern was stuck in gooey Harlem mud, there to list forlornly until the next high tide floated her up, long past midnight...
When Anthony Fokker bowed out of U. S. aviation in 1931 he was by no means out of business. He was still building Fokkers in Holland, and for the last two years he has been assembling Douglas aircraft abroad under a cross-licensing agreement making him the Douglas manufacturer for Europe. War scares abroad have boomed his business to a reputed $500,000 monthly. He is currently seeking a license to build Fokker ships in Canada...