Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkSheppard
Likely prospects Post War: The Big Four (Junkers, Messerschmidt, Focke-Wulf and Heinkel) are likely to swallow up smaller competitors as the cost of military aircraft gets bigger and bigger with the coming of the Late Jet Age (1950s), then the first airborne computers (late 1950s, early 1960s).
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Then again, this may not be the actual result. In the United States; Curtiss-Wright produced 29,269 airplanes and employed 180,000 workers and was #2 in total contracts awarded just behind General Motors.
Yet Curtiss-Wright's last plane made for the US military was the XF-87 Blackhawk in 1948; with the entire airplane division of Curtiss-Wright being sold 100% to North American Aviation after the F-87 contracts were cancelled.
Likewise, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation started in 1939 and spent most of WW2 being a major parts subcontractor for the bigger primes; and produced a few prototype aircraft, then got big with the jet age in aviation and then swallowed Douglas Aircraft to become McDonnell Douglas.
Then there's internal politics: the German aviation industry is pretty much a deliberate creation of the Reich Air Ministry (RLM); so politics is a big thing in it -- in May 1941, Milch managed to bring Junkers, Messerschmitt and Heinkel under near-direct RLM control by:
*Using the dud of the Me210 to force Willy Messerschmidt from managerial control
*Ending the RLM practice of advance payments for aircraft yet to be delivered to cause a financial crisis at Heinkel, to force Ernst Heinkel out of management.
*Forcing Junkers' chairman Heinrich Koppenberg, into retirement.
So there's a lot of room for flavor here for the late 1950s and early 1960s stuff; e.g. you might as well see the Me 910 Gerfalke instead of the MBB Gerfalke (Slots 764-769 in OBAT35 - Grossdeutsches Reich); as the mergers of Messerschmitt with Bölkow and Blohm + Voss might never happen -- or the corporate identities of the two lesser units are subsumed by the larger company, as what happened with North American Rockwell / Rockwell International and Boeing -- the NAA/Rockwell identity was destroyed in Boeing, to the point that Boeing basically threw away a good portion of the North American Rockwell archives in dumpsters following the merger.