Word: messerschmitts
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Before World War II, Bayerische Motoren Werke was famous as a maker of motorcycles and racing cars. During the war, the Munich plant produced airplane engines for the Junker bombers and for Hitler's jet fighter, the Messerschmitt ME 262. In 1947, after the U.S. Army stopped using BMW's shops to repair its tanks, the company started making motorcycles again, and began looking around for a car design as well. Misjudging the market, BMW decided on an eight-cylinder luxury job which cost so much to build that it lost money from the start. Simultaneously, the company...
...Germans blame the Starfighter crashes, in which 37 pilots have perished, on faulty maintenance and the fact that most of the pilots are inexperienced. To overcome the problems, the Bonn Defense Ministry is now farming out maintenance on the 1,450 m.p.h. planes to such skilled German firms as Messerschmitt, is sending pilots to the U.S. for training. Just in case, it has decided to install better ejection seats so that fewer lives will be lost in the falling Starfighters...
Happy to Try. Tall, hollow-eyed Rudolf Hess has been a prisoner ever since the night of May 10, 1941, when he shocked the world by parachuting from a Messerschmitt fighter onto the Duke of Hamilton's estate in Scotland. His mission, he claimed, was to end the war between "the great Nordic nations" Britain and Germany. Hess did not have the approval of Hitler for his peacemaking mission, and indeed was quickly denounced by the Führer as "crazy." Hess remains convinced of the sacredness of his mission. "True, I achieved nothing," he wrote. "I could...
Merger Drive. Europeans are not likely to see a Siddeley-Messerschmitt or a Rolls-Fiat company for some time, but, mergers within the British aviation industry itself are in the offing. The government hopes to induce a merger between the two big airframe manufacturers, British Aircraft Corp. and Hawker Siddeley, and perhaps even to try to unite the two proud jet engine builders, Rolls-Royce and Bristol Siddeley. The combined companies presumably would be able to lift productivity, which is only one-third as high as in the U.S. aerospace industry, and two-thirds as high as in the French...
Merging his brainpower with somebody else's capital has already become a successful formula for Founder Ludwig Bölkow, 52, who designed Messerschmitt's earliest jet fighter during World War II. When Germany resumed aircraft and arms production in 1956, Bölkow lined up $306,000 in capital from a Hamburg banker, shifted his tiny Stuttgart engineering firm into the development of complete weapons systems. First came the Cobra, a tank-killer rocket that was adopted by the German army, was sold to Denmark and Italy, and got Bölkow into antitank and antiaircraft rocket...