User:Qwazywabbit/gustovpre-edit

The story of Gustav Otto and his companies is comlicated, to say the very least - fitting to his own personality. Interestingly, Gustav Otto was the son of Nikolaus August Otto, the inventor of the first practical 4 stroke internal combustion engine (called to this day the Otto Motor at least in Germany), as well as one of the leading German industrialists (he also founded the Deutz gas engine company, which later merged into the Kloeckner Humbold Deutz conglomerate). As such, Gustav Otto was quite whealthy for the early 20th century, but his main success consisted of loosing his fathers fortune (being a broken man, with psychological problems for quite some years, he finally comitted suicide in 1926)...

The Otto Flugzeugwerke were founded in 1910; Otto received the German aviation licence no 34 in the same year. He concentrated on building Farman inspired pushers (he had got his licence on an Aviatik-Farman himself), and soon became the main supplier for the "Bayrische Fliegertruppen". However, he could not get any orders from the Prussian military. This was the reason why he founded the Ago Fluggesellschaft in Johannisthal on April 1, 1912. The founding of this company had nothing to do with the fortunes of the mother company - this is an invention of later years. To complicate things further, Gustav Otto also founded the A.G.O. company (for Aeromotor Gustav Otto), which was based in Munich, build aircraft engines and had nothing to do with Ago in Johannisthal (note the different way the names are written).

Both the Otto and the Ago companies, which from 1914 developed different aircraft, were not successful in getting in orders. The Otto company was taken over by a consortium including some banks in 1916 (4 years after Ago had been established), and was developed into the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (in which Albatros had an interest). Ago closed down in 1918, the facilities being taken over by AEG.

Even contemporary sources were confused by this developments. For example, a 1916 publication on "Moderne Flugzeuge in Wort und Bild" (modern aircraft in text and pictures - actually describing aircraft up to 1914) has difficulties do differentiate between the "Otto" and the "Ago" pushers, but states that these "are closely related,a s Ago is a daughter company of Otto".

Loolking on the Buechner Otto/Ago/Pfalz, the facts seem to be:

1. This was actually a completely private aircrat, bought/sponsored by the taylor company Hertzog of Berlin (usually described as an "internationally famous company"). The aircraft actually carried the companies name below it´s lower wing.

2. The aircraft is usually described as an "Ago", indicating that Hertzog bought it from Ago (which makes sense, as Hertzog and Ago were both Berlin based).

3. The aircraft is clearly a Pfalz build aircraft,as can be seen from the logo on the fuselage side. More precisely, the first Pfalz build Otto pusher, most probably actually build from the airframe delivered by Otto to Pfalz (Otto a/c number 166). No idea how this whole chain came into existence.

4. Compared to the Aviatik and Roland, which were bought through the Nationale Flugspende and therefore directly used when the war broke out, the Pfalz had to be officially requisitioned before use. Volker is offline