One of the rarest surviving Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter planes in the world is currently on display in Germany, and it is still owned by the Royal Air Force. The aircraft, a two-seat Fw 190 F-8 U-1 conversion trainer, is the only survivor of roughly 20 two-seat versions built out of more than 20,000 Fw 190s produced during World War II. The plane was originally a standard single-seat F-8 fighter before it was converted at the Arado plant at Warnemünde in 1944. The conversion involved modifying the space where the radio equipment was housed into a small cockpit, allowing an instructor to sit behind the student pilot.
These conversion trainers were used to teach Junkers Ju 87 Stuka pilots how to fly the Fw 190 and also served as high-speed liaison aircraft. This particular example was captured at Grove in Denmark in May 1945. It was brought to Britain and ferried from Farnborough to RAF Brize Norton on September 5, 1945, by the noted Royal Navy test pilot Lieutenant Commander Eric “Winkle” Brown. The aircraft is owned by the Royal Air Force and has been loaned to the Military History Museum at the former RAF Gatow airfield in Berlin for three years.
The Fw 190, nicknamed the “butcher bird,” was designed by Kurt Tank and entered service in 1941. It became a mainstay of the German fighter force, outperforming the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and serving as a fighter, fighter-bomber, ground attack aircraft, and occasionally a night fighter. According to the account that drew attention to the Berlin display, only 28 original Fw 190s are known to exist today in museums and private collections worldwide. There are also 21 reproduction aircraft around the world, many of them airworthy, but no reproduction two-seater has been built so far.
Another notable Fw 190 in Britain is an A-8 R-6 model formerly suspended from the ceiling of the Imperial War Museum in London. It was moved to the RAF Museum at Cosford in 2013 for restoration and is currently displayed there. That aircraft originally served as the control plane for a Mistel S3B composite flying bomb, paired with a Junkers 88. The pilot of the Fw 190 would fly the combination near the target, release the Junkers 88, which continued toward the target, and then attempt to escape back to base.
The system was primitive but was used against bridges and other precision strike targets with heavy defenses. That Fw 190 was captured by the RAF on May 8, 1945, at an airfield in Denmark, and ferried to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in November 1945. It was not tested and remained in storage until it was loaned to the Imperial War Museum in 1967. The Smithsonian’s Steven F.
Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia displays an Fw 190 F-8 from the Luftwaffe’s ground attack wing two. Captured intact by US forces in 1945 and transferred to the Smithsonian in 1949, it had seen service on the Eastern Front, likely based in Hungary. The two-seat Fw 190 in Berlin, by contrast, is described as a unique surviving example of one of the most important fighter aircraft of the 20th century. Its distinctive cockpit arrangement, born from the need to train Stuka pilots on a faster and more powerful fighter, marks it as a singular relic of late-war German aviation.
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One of the rarest surviving Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter planes in the world is currently on display in Berlin, and it is still owned by the Royal Air Force. The aircraft, a two-seat Fw 190 F-8 U-1 conversion trainer, is the only survivor of roughly 20 two-seat versions built out of more than 20,000 Fw 190s produced during World War II. The plane was originally a standard single-seat F-8 fighter before it was converted at the Arado plant at Warnemünde in 1944. The conversion involved modifying the space where the radio equipment was housed into a small cockpit, allowing an instructor to sit behind the student pilot.
These conversion trainers were used to teach Junkers Ju 87 Stuka pilots how to fly the Fw 190 and also served as high-speed liaison aircraft. This particular example was captured at Grove in Denmark in May 1945. It was brought to Britain and ferried from Farnborough to RAF Brize Norton on September 5, 1945, by the noted Royal Navy test pilot Lieutenant Commander Eric “Winkle” Brown. The aircraft is owned by the Royal Air Force and has been loaned to the Military History Museum at the former RAF Gatow airfield in Berlin for three years.
The Fw 190, nicknamed the “butcher bird,” was designed by Kurt Tank and entered service in 1941. It became a mainstay of the German fighter force, outperforming the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and serving as a fighter, fighter-bomber, ground attack aircraft, and occasionally a night fighter. According to the account that drew attention to the Berlin display, only 28 original Fw 190s are known to exist today in museums and private collections worldwide. There are also 21 reproduction aircraft around the world, many of them airworthy, but no reproduction two-seater has been built so far.
Another notable Fw 190 in Britain is an A-8 R-6 model formerly suspended from the ceiling of the Imperial War Museum in London. It was moved to the RAF Museum at Cosford in 2013 for restoration and is currently displayed there. That aircraft originally served as the control plane for a Mistel S3B composite flying bomb, paired with a Junkers 88. The pilot of the Fw 190 would fly the combination near the target, release the Junkers 88, which continued toward the target, and then attempt to escape back to base.
The system was primitive but was used against bridges and other precision strike targets with heavy defenses. That Fw 190 was captured by the RAF on May 8, 1945, at an airfield in Denmark, and ferried to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in November 1945. It was not tested and remained in storage until it was loaned to the Imperial War Museum in 1967. The Smithsonian’s Steven F.
Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia displays an Fw 190 F-8 from the Luftwaffe’s ground attack wing two. Captured intact by US forces in 1945 and transferred to the Smithsonian in 1949, it had seen service on the Eastern Front, likely based in Hungary. The two-seat Fw 190 in Berlin, by contrast, is described as a unique surviving example of one of the most important fighter aircraft of the 20th century.
Its distinctive cockpit arrangement, born from the need to train Stuka pilots on a faster and more powerful fighter, marks it as a singular relic of late-war German aviation.