Heinrich Focke

Heinrich Focke was a German aircraft engineer associated with the Focke-Wulf company. In the source dossier that is the source for this page, he appears solely as the designer of the Focke Rochen (Focke Stingray), a German VTOL aircraft project of the late World War II period.

Role in the Rochen project

The archive page states that "towards the last years of the Third Reich, Heinrich Focke started design work on the Rochen, also known as Schnellflugzeug, as soon as he had the relevant data for the new German jet engines." It attributes to him a 1939 patent on "the idea of a circular aircraft with a large airfoil section and an open center that acted as a huge propeller duct for twin contra-rotating propellers," and a further patent filing for the aircraft in 1957. The page does not reconcile the two dates.

The page also states that after the war "a wooden 1/10 scale model of the Rochen was built in Bremen and subjected to wind tunnel tests," and that the aircraft "was never built."

Scope of this page

This page records only what the source dossier asserts about Focke. It does not cover his wider career, his other aircraft, or his biography beyond the Rochen project, because the source does not. The five patent documents linked from the archive page (DE953938 — Kombiniertes Hubschrauber-Drachenflugzeug, US2978037 — Stabilizing Means for Helicopter Aircraft, CA587730 — Flying Machines for Vertical and Horizontal Flight, GB768190 — Improvements in Flying Machines for Vertical and Horizontal Flight, DE950169 — Hubschrauber mit Schraubenblaettern) are the primary artifacts associated with his name in this source.