Dornier Do X

The Dornier Do X was the largest, heaviest, and most powerful flying boat in the world when it was produced by the Dornier company of Germany in 1929. First conceived by Claude Dornier in 1924, planning started in late 1925 and after over 240,000 work-hours it was completed in June 1929.

During the years between the two World Wars, only the Soviet Tupolev ANT-20 Maksim Gorki landplane of a few years later was physically larger, but at 53 metric tonnes maximum takeoff weight it was not as heavy as the Do X's 56 tonnes.

The Do X was financed by the German Transport Ministry and in order to circumvent conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade any aircraft exceeding set speed and range limits to be built by Germany after World War I, a specially designed plant was built at Altenrhein, on the Swiss side of Lake Constance.

The type was popular with the public, but a lack of commercial interest and a number of non-fatal accidents prevented more than three examples from being built.

The Flugschiff ("flying ship"), as it was called, was launched for its first test flight on 12 July 1929, with a crew of 14. To satisfy skeptics, on its 70th test flight on 21 October there were 169 on board of which 150 were passengers (mostly production workers and their families, and a few journalists), ten were aircrew and nine were stowaways. The flight set a new world record for the number of people carried on a single flight, a record that would stand for 20 years.
☁️
Text: Wikipedia
Canvas-size: 320x320px
Colors: 16