Messerschmitt M 18 – Winning Against All Odds

Tuotekuvaus:

The book should actually be called ‘BFW M 18’ as Willy Messerschmitt/Messerschmitt Flugzeugbau sold all the rights of his models M 17 and M 18 to the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (BFW) in Augsburg. One of the stipulations of the contract was that the aircraft should be called ‘BFW’ + the type number. The signing of the contract between Messerschmitt Flugzeugbau and BFW was on 8 September 1927 and since then every Messerschmitt M 18 was called BFW M 18, including the M 18s that were built in Bamberg as Messerschmitt M 18. On the first M 18 one can see the words ‘Messerschmitt M 18’ on the tail, but this was forbidden after Willy Messerschmitt had signed the contract. To be consistent, I will use the designation BFW M 18 (also for the other types, like M 20 and M 24).

The aircraft also saw service outside Germany and was sold in small numbers to the Republic of China (1), Portugal (1), Romania (2) and Switzerland (2). In addition, two aircraft were built under licence in Switzerland. The foreign operated aircraft flew pleasure flights but mainly aerial survey flights. They had several cameras on board, mostly from the suppliers Wild and Zeiss-Jena. Photographs of the Swiss aircraft s/n 713 in this book offer the reader a view of the working station of the camera operator. The last aircraft was struck off charge in Switzerland in 1954, just after it had been used for crop dusting. The rich history of all aircraft will be described in this book, as always illustrated with numerous photographs and colour profiles. Hubert Cance has again made detailed cutaway drawings of the BFW M 18b (landplane) and the BFW M 18d (seaplane).

216 pages, 210x224mm (A4), 274 photographs, 20 color profiles, 3 cutaway (M 17, M 18b, M 18d), and colour brochure.