Visitors to the Sun’n Fun 2024 Aerospace Expo, which took place in April 2024 in Lakeland, Florida, came across an aircraft that looked like straight of the 1920s.
The aircraft in question certainly looked the part, but it didn’t come out of a museum or some heritage flight formation, nor had it traveled through time.
It was, in fact, a newly built plane.
The Junkers A50 Heritage has, in fact, been designed to recreate, to the smallest detail, the look and feel of the aircraft of that era, albeit with modern engines and materials.
But didn’t Junkers go out of business many, many decades ago?
This legendary, century-old, German aviation brand is, actually, staging a remarkable comeback and it is doing so from rather unexpected quarters: from the other side of the Atlantic and by the hand of a luggage magnate.
But to get the full picture, we must, first, take a step back in time.
One of the towering characters of the early years of aviation was German aviation pioneer Hugo Junkers (1859-1935).
Junkers, whose surname has since become synonymous with iconic aircraft, started making planes for the Kaiser’s army during the First World War. After the war, he perfected his designs and went on to produce some of the most technologically advanced aircraft of the inter-war years.
One of them was the aforementioned Junkers A50 Junior sports plane, first launched in 1929. Another was the F13, an all-metal, cantilever-wing monoplane, which, despite being launched as early as 1919, already anticipated the shapes and lines of modern aircraft.
But perhaps Junkers’ best-known design was the versatile tri-engine Ju-52 aircraft, which first flew in 1930 and was used extensively as an airliner and as a military transport aircraft in the 1930s and throughout the Second World War.
One common and easily identifiable element that all these aircraft had in common was the corrugated duralumin (a type of aluminum-copper alloy) fuselage, which gave them a truly distinctive look.
Interestingly, corrugated aluminum surfaces are also a signature trait of the RIMOWA upmarket luggage brand, also from Germany. This is not by coincidence.
On its website, RIMOWA explains how its characteristic groovy suitcases, which first appeared in 1950, are, in fact, inspired by the Junkers designs.
It is at this point that German businessman Dieter Morszeck enters the story.
Morszeck, who used to be the majority owner of RIMOWA until he sold the business to French luxury conglomerate LVMH in 2016 for €640 million, has been investing, for a number of years, in the revival of the historical aircraft maker.
To be fair, Morszeck is not alone in recognizing the potential of the Junkers brand.
In 2007, another German firm launched a line of aviation-inspired, Junkers-branded watches after acquiring a license from the descendants of Hugo Junkers.
However, the project Morszeck embarked on is on an entirely different scale: to restart production of some of Junkers’ most iconic aircraft types.
The first of these to make a comeback was also one of Junkers’ earliest designs, the F13.
Under Morszeck’s patronage and following the original blueprints, a team of specialists, engineers, and craftsmen built a flyable replica of the iconic aircraft from scratch. It was identical to the historical one in appearance, but it was built using modern materials and techniques. This new Junkers F13 aircraft flew for the first time in Switzerland in 2016.
If the F13 could be brought back to life and produced in small batches, why not do the same with other larger Junkers models?
Morszeck set up a firm in Germany, Junkers Aircraft GmbH, precisely with this goal in mind.
The new Junkers company even devised plans to create a modernized version of the venerable Ju-52 airliner and transport aircraft, which never fully disappeared. In fact, a handful of them are still in use for panoramic flights, and even Lufthansa kept one in its fleet until 2019!
And while little has been heard of this project in the last couple of years, other classic aircraft remakes have already become a reality.
To do this, Morszeck first contacted a US company with extensive experience in producing vintage aircraft with a modern twist on a serial basis.
Junkers’ new American life
Since the early 1980s, WACO Classic Aircraft Corporation, based in Battle Creek, Michigan, has established a niche in the US general aviation market by reviving some of the most storied aerospace brands in the world.
In fact, the company takes its name from another famed manufacturer from the 1920s.
During the interwar period, the Weaver Aircraft Company, later known as “Waco,” emerged as a significant player in the US aircraft industry. At its peak, Waco secured up to 40% of the market share for specific types of light aircraft.
However, despite having been a major supplier to the US military during the Second World War (Waco gliders played a major role during D-Day and Operation Market Garden), the manufacturer’s ascendancy was short-lived, and the company went out of business shortly after the war.
Several attempts were made to revive the brand during the 1960s and 70s, but it was not until the 1980s that the firm that later became WACO Classic Aircraft began producing a modernized version of the popular 1920s Waco YMF biplane. It later added a remake of another classic, the 1930s Great Lakes biplane.
Morszeck approached WACO to explore the possibility of restarting the production of vintage Junkers aircraft. In 2018, it acquired the US manufacturer and integrated it into the Dimor Group.
As a result of this, WACO has started a small serial production of the Junkers A50 Junior and two derivatives of it, the Junkers A50 Junior Heritage and the Junkers A60.
While all three share some commonalities, such as the groovy fuselage so typical of the original Junkers aircraft and a Galaxy ballistic parachute rescue system, the latter two present some interesting modifications.
The A50 Heritage, for instance, is similar to the regular A50 Junior, but it has been modified to intentionally provide a more “retro” flying experience.
The Heritage version features a 7-cylinder radial engine instead of the A50 Junior four-cylinder Rotax fuel-injected engine, a wooden propeller, and analog instruments instead of the Garmin avionics suite.
The Junkers A60, in turn, is a more modern take on the A50 concept. It is still pretty similar in general conception and aesthetics but with some more prominent modern features, such as a closed cockpit, which, unlike the vintage designs, allows for side-by-side seating.
The original A50 Junior was designed with the idea that thousands of them could be built at relatively affordable prices. However, only 69 of them were actually built, with 3 of them being preserved in museums. Currently, WACO has the capacity to build five or six units of each aircraft type per year, which is not enough to make this historic brand a household name in aviation circles again.
However, with a retail price of US$230,000 to 299,000 (for the Heritage version), this modern Junkers aircraft company is ready to fulfill Hugo Junkers’ vision of the A50 Junior as a “people’s plane”.
