Fokker S.IX

The Fokker S.IX was a military trainer aircraft produced in the Netherlands in the mid-1930s, designed at the request of the Royal Netherlands Navy for a machine to replace its obsolete Fokker S.IIIs. It was a conventional single-bay biplane with staggered wings of unequal span braced with N-struts, with the pilot and instructor in tandem open cockpits and a fixed tailskid undercarriage with divided main units; the wing was wooden, the fuselage welded steel tube and the whole aircraft fabric-covered. The Navy approved the design and ordered 27, later reduced to 15, and the Royal Netherlands Army Aviation Group ordered two batches of 20 with a different engine, none of which had been delivered by the German invasion of 1940. There were two versions, the S.IX/1 with an Armstrong Siddeley Genet Major engine for the Army and the S.IX/2 with a Menasco Buccaneer for the Navy. After the war the air charter company Frits Diepen Vliegtuigen ordered three more, which were used to train pilots into the 1950s.