The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-10-07
FOKkER TELLS STORY OF WIRELESS STEERED
 DEADLY AIRPLANES
Asserts His Connection With Germany Was Purely Financial-Made Millions of Marks By
 His Inventions

partly intended to delude tlie Allies into believing that the Germans were developing their big guns instead of preparing to discard them; and if they had not tangled up in their own red tape they would have rendered the big guns useless before the armistice came. I prepared the plans they asked for. I found that we could make use of old engines that were not reliable for fighting planes. All we asked of an engine was that it should fly for about four hours at the most. Of course, each one of these aeroplanes, with it's engine would be blown up when the bomb exploded. The whole thing was not much more expensive than firing long range shells and 1t would be far more sure and far more deadly My plans were accepted by the au- thor+ties, and then the War Office made its great mistake. It decided to make the aeroplanes itself. The war Office bungled along with the manu- facture of the planes for many months, and when they had finally turned out a few machines they found that they could not be depend ed upon. In the summer of 1918, three months before the arnistice, they came to me and gave me a huge order for the wireless -steered aero planes. I had just got ready to manu- facture them in wholesale quantities when the end of the war came. Those aeroplanes would have worked havoc wherever they were used. It would have been like shooting huge shells hundreds of miles with a range that was absolutely accurate"
 \ Sporting AeropIane
 What will be the aeropIane of the next war?'' asked
 ''The winged wireless-ste bomb and great aerop1anes that will carry hundreds of men,
 How fast will they go? What Is the speed limit of an aeroplane?''
 'The only speed limit is your pocl1et-book. Give me plenty of money and I can make an aeroplane that will go as fast as you can imagine
 Fokker showed me a photo of an aeroplane without an engine. ''This is my very latest idea,' he said proudly. Tt was an aeroplane that can be lowed behind another plane"
 Did you intend to use it in war fare asked.
 '+The war is over now" he said smiling. 'tNfy idea now is to put it cut as a sporting idea. It costs very little to make motorless aeroplane. Sporting contests with such machines would be very much like coasting contests on the winter runs in the Alps. An air coaster could be lowed by an aeroplane to a height of 5000 ft- or more, and then they could be let loose and come down. He could make a record of staying in the air longer than some other contestant He might try to make more spirals downward than other competitors, or he might try for speed in coming down. There are dozens of different contests that might be made with these air coasters. They are just as safe as aerop1anes, and think the day will come when air coasting with out engines will be great sport"
 F'okker would tell me little of his further plans to tow a series of these coasters as a locomotive tows a string of cars. He has such a plan, how ever. 'It would not be impossible to set out with a line of lowed coasters,'' he said, "and have each coaster cut loose when 1t reached the town where the passengers in the particu- lar coaster wished to alight'' When I asked him whether the Germans had planned to move troops during the war by means of such coasters he gave me a smile for an answer. l asked him whether he had done any aeroplane fighting in the war.
 'tNot bit,'' he satd;;' I have never fired a shot at the Allies. I was a neutral expert and manufacturer. and that part was the only part I played. What is more, I have too much inn agination to be an air fighter. I could see too clearly in my mind what might happen to me if I were hit. It takes a youth with not a bit of i'm aginatton in his makeup to be an ace''
 Whatever one may think of Folk ker and the part he played in the great war-which was not a small one by any means, as the graves of thousands of Allied flying bear tes tfmony-he Is one of the worlds greatest and most irnaginatiye air dreamers. He told me that he want ed to go to the United States soon.
 Holland is too sma11,'' he explained. and Germany is through"