Audiobook16 hours
Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation
Written by Marc Dierikx
Narrated by L.J. Ganser
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
Comprehensive biography of Anthony Fokker, the famed Dutch pilot and daredevil aviator Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation tells the larger-than-life true story of maverick pilot and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker. Fokker came from an affluent Dutch family and developed a gift for tinkering with mechanics. Despite not receiving a traditional education, he stumbled his way into aviation as a young stunt pilot in Germany in 1910. He survived a series of spectacular airplane crashes and rose to fame within a few years. A combination of industrial espionage, luck, and deception then propelled him to become Germany's leading aircraft manufacturer during World War I, making him a multimillionaire by his midtwenties. When the German Revolution swept the country in 1918 and 1919, Fokker made a spectacular escape to the United States. He set up business in New York and New Jersey in 1921, and shortly thereafter became the world's largest aircraft manufacturer. The U.S. Army and Navy acquired his machines, and his factories equipped legendary carriers such as Pan American and TWA at the dawn of commercial air transport. Yet despite his astounding success, his empire collapsed in the late 1920s after a series of ill-conceived business decisions and deeply upsetting personal dramas. In 1927, aviator Richard Byrd solicited a Fokker three-engine plane to be the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. The plane was damaged on a test flight and Charles Lindbergh beat him to it. Lindbergh's solo adventure in the Spirit of St. Louis earned him-and cost Fokker-a lasting place in the history books. Using previously undiscovered records and primary sources, Marc Dierikx traces Fokker's extraordinary life and celebrates his spectacular achievements.
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Reviews for Anthony Fokker
Rating: 3.875 out of 5 stars
4/5
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As others have noted this is as much, if not more, of a biography of Fokker the businessman than of Fokker the aviator, and as a businessman Fokker was always on his own side. This was of particular annoyance to Dutch authorities who saw Fokker as a national resource who should have been serving Dutch national interests in exchange for being taken back into the fold with no questions asks after World War I. The small problem there was Fokker was both too practical and too ambitious, and frankly, too individualistic to be a good little Dutchman serving the interests of the Dutch government. In fact, you can say that Fokker's greatest success was as a sales agent for Douglas & Lockheed as America came to be the dominant factor in European civil aviation. If this work seems a little dry considering how "colorful" a life Fokker led, it's because a lot of official documentation has been lost and Fokker was not one for putting his inner thoughts on paper, as much as he always had an opinion he was prepared to vent. Dierikx credits the revolution of online sources of information as a goad to wanting to revisit Fokker twenty years after his first book on the man.