Fokker 50
Netherlands - Air Force
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Fokker 50
Avianca
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Fokker 50
Air Baltic
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Fokker F50
The Fokker F50 was a small, turboprop-powered airliner designed as a refinement
of and successor to the highly successful Fokker Friendship.
Sales of the Fokker F-27 "Friendship", which had been in continuous production
since 1958, was beginning to decline by the 1980's. Fokker management, notably
Frans Swarttouw, decided that an aeronautical and electronic update of both the
F-27 and the F-28 (the short-range twin jet for ca 85 passengers) were in order.
Design started in 1983.
The F50, as the new design was called for marketing reasons, was based on the
stretched F-27-500, but with a larger number of smaller windows in the fuselage
and a two wheel nose gear. Basic construction of the fuselage, wings, and empennage
remained unchanged apart from local strenghthening where needed. The
wing was equiped with upturned aileron- and wingtips, acting more or less as
wing endplates or winglets.
The major design change was in the engines and in equiping the aircraft with an
electronic flight and engine management system. The original Rolls-Royce Darts,
in various marks of basically 1700 to 2300 HP, was replaced with two, fuel
efficient, Pratt & Whitney Canada PW124 of max 2500 HP, driving a 6 bladed
Dowty Rotol propeller. Around 50 passengers can be carried over 2000 km at a
typical speed of 530 km/h, a 50 km/h increase over the F-27. Certification of
the F50 (official name: F-27 Mk050) by the Dutch aviation authority RLD was
succesfully completed in 1987, after four years of design review and flight
testing and first delivery was made to DLT of Germany. In 1996, production ended
with the demise of the Fokker Aircraft Company after 213 F50's (and 768 F-27's)
had been produced. Most of these are still in operation at the beginning of 2005.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fokker F50".
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