Aged 56 by the time his first aircraft had flown, Professor Hugo Junkers can be described as one of the greatest aviation pioneers and a maverick to boot. His approach to how an aircraft should be built was like no other and, rather than modifying, re-designing or copying ideas from other pioneers, Junkers took his own unique route and doggedly stuck to it for the two decades. Proceeding in the face of the theory that aircraft should be built from wood and fabric, all Junkers aircraft, from the 'Tin Donkey' of 1915 onwards, were made of metal, a material that was regarded, right up to the early 1930s by many other aircraft manufacturers as being too heavy. Wood and fabric were of course ideal from a performance and massed production point of view, but Junkers was a visionary who had no ambition to make money on the back of military aircraft. His goal was to prove that metal would display a much greater durability from a long-term commercial service point of view and his unceasing efforts to prove this also made Junkers and his aircraft as pioneers of the airline industry.
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