Junkers K 47

The Junkers K 47 was a two-seat fighter developed in Sweden in the late 1920s by the Swedish subsidiary of Junkers, with a civil development designated the A 48. It was designed to meet a requirement of the Turkish government as a strut-braced, low-wing monoplane with open cockpits for the pilot and tail-gunner and twin vertical tail surfaces to widen the rearward field of fire. Karl Plauth began the design and Hermann Pohlmann completed it after Plauth's death. Because it was plainly a military type and therefore banned in Germany by the Versailles Treaty, it was first built in Sweden. Turkey had lost interest by the time the prototype was complete; the Soviet Union bought only two or three, while the Nanking government of China bought ten in 1931 and was presented with one more in 1934, and used them in the 1932 Shanghai fighting. Three served at the Reichswehr training facility at Lipetsk, and K 47s were used in dive-bombing trials that shaped Pohlmann's thinking on the Ju 87, whose second prototype was fitted with a K 47 tail.