The Fokker Dr.1 Tri-Plane...Truly Worthy?

The Red Baron made this plane not only famous, but also effective. Yet he was one of the exceptional few to accomplish the latter and the only one to accomplish the former.  Manfred von Richthofen was a special talent in the air. Few matched his prowess as an aerial hunter and marksman.

The Dr.1 was beautiful. It's the stuff of grand fighter pilot lore thanks to Manfred.

Despite that, the Dreidecker's run was short.

The tri-plane proved too often flimsy. Wing failures were repetitive in development late in 1917 causing Anthony Fokker to flip the bill for wing and structural modifications as well as tighter quality controls over production.  Finally, come 1918, a modest allocation to merely 14 squadrons was approved.

A remarkably manueverable airplane, especially at low altitudes even down near the deck, the Dr.1's power was minimal. Its rate of climb was above average, but once at high altitude it instantly became the lesser aircraft. In the right hands of which the Baron's were one of the few, it could acrobatically allude faster more powerful Allied planes. The idea was get the enemy down near the treetops and guide them into a mistake before they got you back upstairs.

However, the wing failures continued in combat. German pilots came to find they couldn't reliably utilize the plane's striking manueverability, its #1 asset, comfortably and consistently. The Dr.1 was pulled from frontline battle by mid-Spring, a run of barely more than 300 completed. There were other factors; sub-par design attributes like poor cockpit visibility, a marginal gun platform, the growing effectiveness of the Allies' SPAD, and the inception of Fokker's own D-VII.

While it's the iconic beauty everyone recognizes from Snoopy to dear ol' dad, a peek behind the hangar door reveals a surprisingly short-lived and somewhat ineffective career particularly outside the magic hands of Manfred von Richtofen.

 http://www.eaa.org/