Aeroplane: LFG Roland D.VI

Germany
fighter aircraft

The last months of 1917 and the beginning of the lst year of the First World War were under the sign of fixing the shortages. The lack of qualified personnel, equipment, fuel, engines, materials, and the never ending efforts of regaining the air superiority, fruited in designing more and more interesting constructions.
The single seat fighter wooden biplane, the LFG Roland was created by the end of 1917 and produced since 1918 at the Berlin company - the Luft-Fahrzeug Gesellschaft m.b.H. Its trade mark was Roland - the knight - that is why the name of the aircraft. The chief designer of the company, Kurt Tanzen, together with the engineers Richter and Cammerer worked out a method of making the streamlined fuselages as the shells formed from strips of plywood, attached to the light skeleton, made of multi layer, glued formers and the spruce longerons. This method, however, known as the "Klinkerrumpf", being the one of the methods of solving the problems with the plywood shortages, was very time consuming.
After the initial forming of the two halves of a fuselage on a wooden mould, they were put together on a light skeleton. After assembly, the entire fuselage was coated with a special dope, based on the copal resin. Mass production started 1918. As a first, there came the three aircraft of the prototype series, the Roland D.VI, powered with the D.III/Bz.IIIa engine.
Also in February, the first fifty airframes of the D.VIa version were produced. The next hundred machines were assembled in June 1918.This batch was powered with the D.III engine. The airframes of the D.VIb series with the Bz IIIa engines were produced from April until September same year. In total, 359 copies of this fighter were built.
The first Roland reached the frontline in May 1918. From available sources it is known that the majority of those machines came as the endowment of the fighter flights (Jasta) 23b, 32b, 33, 35b as well as navy flights. By the end of June, fifty five Roland VI fighters were engaged in combat altogether, the next seventy joined them in August. This is the last month, where the credible data, concerning the combat engagement of these machines are coming from. Despite the undoubtedly features, the Roland didn't play a major role in the First World War - they were outperformed by simpler and better powered Fokker D.VII's. The Roland, disposing a formidable aerodynamic characteristic, had insufficient power for vertical combat. Another problem was the frequent braking of the fuselage in the section behind the pilot's cockpit - specially, during hard landings.
Displayed at the museum, the 2225/18 LFG Roland D.VI, took part in the second fighter's competition in Adlershof. After the end of hostilities, it reached the German Aviation Collection and after finding it in 1945, it's destroyed fuselage came to Krakow in 1963.
The demolished fuselage, broken into three bigger and some smaller pieces, was integrated (recreating part of the formers and many fragments of the skin). All the original fragments came back to its place and the whole of the fuselage was impregnated with the copal resin based dope (as in the original). The displayed airframe is a unique world copy.

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