Focke-Wulf Fw 190: the Luftwaffe's rugged workhorse fighter

The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was a single-seat fighter built by Focke-Wulf and designed by Kurt Tank to fly alongside the Messerschmitt Bf 109 as the Luftwaffe’s second main fighter type of the Second World War. It first flew on 1 June 1939 and went on to serve as a day fighter, bomber-destroyer, ground-attack aircraft and night fighter. Production ran from 1941 to 1945, with 65 further aircraft built after the war for the French Air Force, and more than 20,000 were built in total¹.

Design and development

The German Air Ministry asked Focke-Wulf in late 1937 for a fighter to complement the Bf 109, and Tank’s team settled on the air-cooled BMW radial engine rather than a liquid-cooled unit, partly to avoid competing with the Bf 109 for scarce Daimler-Benz engines. The production version was powered by one BMW 801D-2 14-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engine¹. Tank described his design philosophy as building a “cavalry horse” rather than a “racehorse” like the Bf 109 or Spitfire: an aircraft that minimally trained ground crews could maintain and that could absorb battle damage.

That approach shaped several features that set the Fw 190 apart from the Bf 109: a wide-tracked, inward-retracting undercarriage that made it far less prone to the ground-handling accidents that plagued the Bf 109’s narrow gear, rigid pushrods in place of cables for crisper control response, and electrically rather than hydraulically powered systems for the undercarriage and armament.

Specifications

The Fw 190 A-8, the most-built fighter variant, was 8.95 m long with a wingspan of 10.506 m and a maximum take-off weight of 4,900 kg. It carried a single pilot and was powered by one BMW 801D-2 radial engine. Combat range was about 400 km; ferry range without extra fuel ran to roughly 900–1,000 km, extendable to about 1,800–2,000 km with a drop tank¹.

Variants

Production split into four main series. The A-series, the radial-engined backbone of the programme, totalled 13,291 aircraft from the early A-1 through the heavily armoured, boosted A-8/A-9, of which 6,655 A-8s alone were built. The F-series, a dedicated ground-attack version with bomb racks replacing some armament, added 7,279 aircraft, and the G-series, a long-range fighter-bomber able to carry extra fuel and bombs together, contributed about 1,300 more¹.

The A-series lost performance above 6,000 metres, so Focke-Wulf developed the D-series with the inline Junkers Jumo 213 engine for high-altitude work, of which 1,826 were built; the main D-9 model alone accounted for 1,805 of those, produced between August 1944 and April 1945¹.

Operators and service

The Luftwaffe was the main operator, flying the type from its combat debut on the Western Front in August 1941 to the end of the war, including from November/December 1942 on the Eastern Front. Heavily armoured Sturmbock variants of the A-6/A-8 flew close-formation attacks on American heavy-bomber formations, and the type was also used for ground attack from October 1943¹ and as a night fighter in “Wilde Sau” tactics from mid-1943.

Beyond Germany, Hungary’s air force received 72 Fw 190F-8s from November 1944, and Turkey took delivery of 72 A-3s between October 1942 and March 1943. Spanish volunteers of the Blue Squadron flew the type on the Eastern Front, and Japan evaluated a single A-5. After the war, France reassembled captured airframes and then built 65 new examples as the SNCAC NC.900¹.

The Fw 190 left Luftwaffe service at Germany’s surrender on 9 May 1945; Hungary retired its examples the same year, Turkey in 1947, and France in 1949¹. A small number survive today as museum pieces and flying warbird restorations, among them the Chino, California example pictured here.

Similar aircraft

• Messerschmitt Bf 109: the Luftwaffe’s other main wartime fighter, which the Fw 190 was designed to complement rather than replace; pilots who flew both generally rated the Fw 190 as more manoeuvrable at low and medium altitude, while the Bf 109 kept an edge at extreme altitude.
• Supermarine Spitfire: the RAF’s main fighter, which the Fw 190 outperformed in most respects but not turn radius when it first appeared, until the improved Spitfire Mk. IX arrived in late 1942¹.
• Hawker Hurricane: an earlier RAF fighter that the Fw 190, entering service in 1941¹, significantly outclassed.