Fokker M.5

The Fokker M.5 was an unarmed single-seat monoplane designed and built by Anthony Fokker in 1913. It served as a light reconnaissance aircraft with the German army at the outbreak of the First World War and was the basis of the Fokker E.I, the first successful fighter in German service. Its design followed the French Morane-Saulnier H shoulder-wing monoplane very closely, though the fuselage had a welded steel tube frame in place of the wooden structure of the Type H, and its all-moving tail and elevators had no fixed sections. A 60 kW Oberursel U.0 seven-cylinder rotary engine, a licence-built Gnome Lambda, powered it, and it came in a long-span M.5L and a short-span M.5K. Light, strong and manoeuvrable, it was capable of aerobatics, though with very sensitive pitch control, and Fokker himself flew it at Johannisthal in May and June 1914, winning a number of awards. The army adopted the long-span version, built by Halberstadt, as the A.II.