Fokker built his first plane in 1910 and taught himself to fly. He was an excellent plot and received German License No. 88 on June 7, 1911.¹ In 1912 he established a small aircraft factory at Johannisthal, near Berlin.

    During World War I he introduced an interrupter system which made it possible to fire a machine gun through the propeller arc without hitting the blades. This was introduced on the Fokker E type Eindecker.²

    In the early 1920s Fokker sold an increasing number of planes to the US military, and in 1922 he established the Atlantic Aircraft Corp. in New Jersey. He also maintained a large aircraft factory in the Netherlands. The first nonstop flight across the United States was made in the Fokker T-2 transport. Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett flew over the North Pole (May 9, 1926) in one of Fokker’s trimotor planes. During the 1920s and the 1930s Fokker concentrated on the design and development of commercial aircraft that were widely used in the fledgling U.S. commercial aviation industry. His autobiography, The Flying Dutchman, was published in 1931. He died on December 23, 1939 in New York.