Procurement of 242 units planned but the performance was not acceptable. A developed version Fw 259 was projected, but cancelled. A Stuka version Fw 188 was also projected.

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The aircraft was shown for the first time in model form at the Brussels Air Show. An illustration with a short description can be found in "Flugsport" 1937 on p. 305. As a supplement to this report we bring some more photos.
Braced high-wing wing of rectangular outline. Rounded ends, indented center piece. The canopy rests on N struts. Every wing half is through intercepted a mid-supported stick after the hull. Aileron light metal frame with fabric covering, dural planked torsion nose.
Round or oval fuselage, front section up to behind the pilots seat metal frame, covered with removable electron sheets. Fuselage end all-metal shell construction.
Closed pilot's seat with sliding hood. Self-supporting tailplane, fins and rudder metal frame with fabric covering.
Retractable landing gear with kinked struts, foldable backwards into the fuselage. Retraction is hydraulic. Footpeg and spur are also retractable intended.

Focke-Wulf Fw 159 A NAMELESS BIRD OF PREY

It could be a North German story, were it not for the fact that it would begin and end in Bavaria. At the very beginning was Udet-Flugzeugbau GmbH, which owed its name to the most successful surviving fighter pilot of the First World War – Ernst Udet (1896-1941). He had founded the company on the outskirts of Munich during the construction ban and, like several other small companies, modestly produced light sports aircraft. After his departure, the company management ventured into the development and construction of a fourengined a motorized passenger aircraft - and promptly ran into financial difficulties.
The Reich Ministry of Transport (RVM), striving to restructure the German aviation industry, seeked help. On July 30, 1926, it founded the Bavarian Aircraft Works AG (BFW) with 400,000 Reichsmarks in capital under the traditional name and acquired the plant-the former Rumpler-Werke AG in Augsburg. The Udet aircraft manufacturing company was to be integrated into this company, and its successful model – the Flamingo training biplane – was to be incorporated as a manufacturing basis. The move was completed quickly. But just as quickly, the company incurred heavy losses and called for government subsidies. Another company also did so.Company: Messerschmitt-Flugzeugbau GmbH in Bamberg.
Founded in 1923 as a sole proprietorship by the then 25-year-old Willy Messerschmitt (1898-1978) with the help of his wine-trading brother, it initially built gliders, then motor gliders, and finally light sport monoplanes. In 1926, Theo Cronei (1894-1942), initiator and founder of Nordbayerische Verkehrsflug GmbH, became a partner to develop light aircraft.to have feeder airliners built. All of this swallowed up a lot of money.
Since the RVM only allowed the state of Bavaria to subsidize a single company, a merger was agreed upon for September 1927, which also resulted in Messerschmitt's relocation to Augsburg. Both companies now appeared as one, but in reality, BFW manufactured what Messerschmitt developed. And he drove the extreme lightweight construction was pursued until
some somewhat overly bold solutions and their consequences led to the initiation of bankruptcy proceedings in 1931. This dragged on until April 1933 and ended with a forced settlement. In May 1933, BFW resumed operations with only 82 employees – at a time of political upheaval.
In the same month, Hermann Göring became Reich Minister of Aviation. He appointed – in a shrewd move – Theo Croneb as Special Commissioner for Aviation in Bavaria. This man had also been designated Minister of Aviation for his SA (Storm Troopers) service by the socialist revolutionary wing of the National Socialists, who wanted to change the power relations again and in their favor through a planned, so-called ‘Second Revolution’. Göring desired a strong aviation industry in his home state of Bavaria.
October 1933: In a confidential letter to Cronei, Göring announced licensing contracts so that he would already be able to recruit a large workforce, and demanded "...the development of a lightning-fast courier aircraft, which only needs to be a single-seater." With this, BFW was in the running for the tender for the future fighter aircraft for the Luftwaffe! The small but highly motivated team of the Technical Office (LC II) in the newly created The Reich Air Ministry (RLM) – originating primarily from the development department of the Reich Defense Ministry – had an intuitive grasp of realities. While outdated biplanes were going into production as risk-averse equipment, it had already defined the development guidelines in December 1933 for a state-of-the-art single-seat pursuit fighter (VJ), which necessarily could only be a monoplane with retractable landing gear.
The most important requirements of this document were a horizontal speed of 400 km/h at an altitude of 6,000 meters for several 20-minute intervals within the total flight time of 90 minutes.
In February 1934, the tender documents were sent to industry. As expected, Arado and Heinkel were considered – the classic fighter aircraft suppliers of the Reichswehr. The inclusion of the little-known BFW in such an important projectgramm brought a new name to the table: the later Prof. Dr. Ing. E.h. Tank. Aircraft designer and pilot-engineer Kurt Tank (1899-1983) joined Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau GmbH in Bremen in November 1931 as head of the design office and flight testing department, simultaneously assuming a board position, and became Technical Director in 1933. Previously (since 1930), he had worked in the project office of BFW, where he had designed the fast postal aircraft.M28 designed. He was therefore familiar with the situation when he approached LCII to secure a VJ development contract for his company.
It is likely that he was supported by Udet, who had been persuaded to serve as an officer for special duties in the RLM from June 1934. Both had jointly undertaken record attempts in the cockpit of a Rohrbach flying boat. And Udet enjoyed flying Focke-Wulf's latest product, the Stösser single-seater exercise aircraft – a strutted high-wing monoplane. Low-wing monoplanes as fighter aircraft, which the other companies had opted for, were suspect to him. Tank was successful: The office expanded the tender in August 1934 to include the high-wing variant and, a month later, awarded Focke-Wulf the contract under the type designation Fw 159, which also included the production of seven prototypes. contained types. Compared to the competitors (whose mock-ups the RLM had already inspected), seven months had to be made up.
The schedule for the Focke-Wulf fighter included a mock-up inspection in June, the flight readiness date of the first prototype in September, and a follow-up flight test by the RLM in November 1935. Tank appointed a Swiss man, born in 1892, who had just received his German citizenship, as the type manager for the Fw 159: Rudolf Blaser. He had been active in the aviation sector since 1912. During the First World War, he had developed large aircraft as a group leader at Gotha and finally, as deputy chief designer at AGO, a tank destroyer. After the war, he designed passenger aircraft at Albatros before the construction ban led him abroad.
In 1927, the Albatros works rehired him as chief engineer. In September 1931, Albatros merged with the Bremen company. This is how Blaser came to Focke-Wulf. He designed the Fw 159 largely conventionally as a high-wing monoplane braced with struts. The forward fuselage section was a welded steel tube construction, as was still preferred by the authorities at that time because of the possibility of numerous removable panels for the inspection of the engine, the tanks, the weapons, and the The internal components were already installed. In contrast,
the rear fuselage was already designed as a lightweight metal shell construction. The wing and empennage surfaces were partly sheet metal-covered, partly fabric-covered lightweight metal structures.
The aircraft's equipment included an extensive hydraulic system that was intended to operate the flaps and extend and retract the main landing gear, as well as, in the planned production version, the tailwheel assembly. The difficulties in the landing gear design arose from the fact that the shock absorbers had to be hinged to the fuselage frame and then folded back into the relatively narrow fuselage with a still acceptable track width. to be able to. The complicated construction was not made any easier by Tank's pet requirement for a trailing-link landing gear, in which the wheel is supported behind a knee joint by the spring strut. This landing gear was to become the Achilles' heel of the Fw 159. The mock-up of the Bremen single-seater fighter was inspected by the RLM on schedule in June 1935. By this time, however, the first prototype of the competing Bf 109 had already flown.
The production engine for the new single-seater fighter was the water-cooled, twelve-cylinder, 20-liter Junkers L 10 engine (later as the Junkers L 10), which was under development. to be able to. The complicated construction was not made any easier by Tank's pet requirement for a trailing-link landing gear, in which the wheel is supported behind a knee joint by the spring strut.
This landing gear was to become the Achilles' heel of the Fw 159. The mock-up of the Bremen single-seater fighter was inspected by the RLM on schedule in June 1935. By this time, however, the first prototype of the competing Bf 109 had already flown.
The production engine for the new single-seater fighter was the water-cooled, twelve-cylinder, 20-liter Junkers L 10 engine (later as the Junkers 210), which was under development.
The Jumo 210 (designated) with a different cylinder arrangement was planned. Since it was not yet ready for early flight testing, the factories were assigned similarly designed Rolls-Royce Kestrel engines of the same power output, but with upright cylinders, for the first prototypes. Focke-Wulf had also requested a Kestrel for the first prototype in November 1934, and simultaneously a Jumo 10 for the second. However, the late start of the program allowed the new Jumbo Kers engine to be installed directly in the Fw 159 V1. It had the works number 932 and was completed two months later, on November 29, 1935. One day later, Wolfgang Stein, head of the test flight operations, took off for the maiden flight. The aircraft was unregistered, unarmed, and still equipped with a three-bladed propeller. Stein's flight demonstration impressed with its speed and elegance. However, during the landing approach, the landing gear only extended halfway (retractable landing gear was a new design feature at that time). Clearly, the aerodynamic forces had been undercalculated for both the hydraulic cylinders and the emergency retraction mechanism. The landing of the aircraft, which ultimately ran out of air, ended with a rollover and a crash. Stein suffered only bruises. A reinforced landing gear was designed, and the aircraft was rebuilt. It was supposed to be finished in 1936, but it was October before it could take off again with the registration D-IUPY. Since, due to corresponding modifications, the Fw 159 V2 (Werk-Nr. 933, D-INGA) was also not ready for flight by the planned date in January 1936 (it only flew five months later), the Focke-Wulf design remained unconsidered during the selection trials, which had begun in February 1936 at the test center in Travemünde, even though these were to continue until October. The selection trials had become a duel between the He 112 and the Bf 109.
However, testing of the Fw 159 continued. On August 13, 1936, the second prototype arrived at the test center. The comparative flights lasted almost four weeks. Conclusion: The aircraft was pleasant to fly and easy to arm, but its outdated design had a decisive disadvantage: It was unsuitable for a single-seat fighters were deemed too slow. Therefore, in March 1936, the RLM proposed equipping them with the newly developed 30-liter Daimler-Benz DB 601 engine and renaming them Fw 259.
However, Focke-Wulf initially submitted an offer for a corresponding pilot series to the RLM along with the bid list for a pre-production aircraft (Fw 159 V3 D-ISXI, W.-
Nr. 1246). This offer was initially accepted, as Udet had become head of the Technical Office in July 1936. He had followed the development of the aircraft with particular interest as Inspector of Fighter and Dive Bomber Aircraft. Its enormous maneuverability particularly impressed him. Therefore, the Fw 159 was immediately designated in the LC lists as a front-line fighter, where maneuverability ranked above speed.
The newly designated front-line fighter briefly appeared in the procurement program: 242 units, including 25 test aircraft, were to be built in 1937/38. However, vibration tests and accidents repeatedly delayed the program. The accidents were predominantly due to landing gear damage with the susceptible articulated landing gear.
It was precisely here that differences arose between the manufacturer VDM and its competitor EC, who complained of patent infringement—unjustly, as turned out after lengthy disputes.
The final end for the first Focke-Wulf fighter came from one of its initiators. the later Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen (1895-1945), at that time head of the testing department in the Technical Office and, at the time of his report in December 1937, a lieutenant colonel and chief of staff with the Condor Legion in Spain. He summarized in his experience report on the Bl 109: "The pursuit fighter possesses unrestricted superiority over all other aircraft. Its kill rate can never be achieved with a front-line fighter. We can therefore completely dispense with the front-line fighter in fighter aviation." By April 1937, it had already been decided that the Fw 159 would not be procured. Even from the pre-production series, only three prototypes (serial numbers 1963 to 1965) could be completed.
The Fw 259 was never even completed. As early as January 1937, the head of the department had been asked to halt work on the prototypes due to poor performance. Focke-Wulf attempted to salvage the concept of the high-performance high-wing monoplane with the project for a Stuka Fw 188 – in vain.
The Bavarian end to this story: Based on experiences during the Spanish Civil War, the Bf 109 was judged significantly better than its Heinkel competitors and thus ultimately chosen as the Luftwaffe's standard fighter. With approximately 35,000 units built, it is one of the most successful aircraft in aviation history.
But there is another  German addendum: Chief Engineer Blaser, at that time the most senior German aircraft engineer and chief designer for single-seaters, created a new competitor to the Bf 109 in the Fw 190 from 1938 onwards – and this time with success!

Technical Description
Wing: Three-piece. Dural structure. Modified NACA airfoil. Center section designed as a canopy, with N-Struts The wing is firmly connected to the fuselage. Outer wing with box spar and leading edge sheeting. Fabric-covered from the spar, braced by I-beams to the fuselage lower chord. Entire trailing edge with flaps. Outer: Frise ailerons, inner: two-part, hydraulically actuated landing flaps.
Fuselage: Forward section (up to behind the seat) as a welded steel tube frame, covered with forming plates. Rear section in duralumin shell construction.
Tailplane: Duralumin structure, partly sheet-covered, partly fabric-covered. Rudder with internal balance. Split elevator with internal balance and additional balance horns. Sealed off by Focke-Wulf-typical endplates.
Landing gear: Towing-type suspension. Hinged to the underside of the fuselage and hydraulically retractable into the fuselage. Covered by hydraulically operated flaps.
Engine: Liquid-cooled, inverted twelve-cylinder V-engine Junkers Jumo 210 B. Fixed or adjustable two-blade propeller. Fuel tank in the fuselage.
Armament: Two fixed, through-the-propeller-fire MG 17 machine guns, each with 1,000 rounds of ammunition, mounted on the forward fuselage. A through-the-propeller-hub-fired engine-mounted cannon with 200 rounds was planned (the originally planned Rheinmetall MG C/30L proved to be too heavy).
Color scheme: All aircraft were completely painted RLM Grey (02)1, and all received -| as was common practice at the time - a civilian registration with black lettering. Most of them
carried the nationality markings on the tail fin (a red band with a white circle and a black swastika standing on its point).