Junkers Ju 52: the story of Tante Ju up to the last sightseeing flights

Three radial engines, a shiny silver corrugated skin and a drone you hear before you see the aircraft: the Junkers Ju 52, which everyone simply calls “Tante Ju”, is one of the best-known aircraft in aviation history. In the 1930s it was Lufthansa’s standard aircraft, flew for decades after the war with airlines and air forces, and later became a flying monument for sightseeing flights. This article tells the story of the Ju 52 from the drawing board in Dessau to the last sightseeing flights and shows you where you can still see Tante Ju today.

The Ju 52 in brief

The Ju 52 is a low-wing all-metal monoplane from Junkers in Dessau. Its trademark is the ribbed light-alloy outer skin, the “corrugated metal”. Best known is the three-engine version Ju 52/3m, which went into series production in 1932. Depending on the fit-out, it carried roughly 15 to 17 passengers and a crew of three, flew at a leisurely pace and was considered robust, good-natured and capable of operating from short runways.

You will find a detailed profile with variants and identification features under Junkers Ju 52. Here we look at the history behind it.

From single-engine freighter to trimotor

The Ju 52 did not begin as a passenger aircraft. Under chief designer Ernst Zindel, Junkers first conceived it as a single-engine freighter for regions with weak infrastructure: robust, low-maintenance and with a large cargo hold. This Ju 52/1m made its first flight in the fall of 1930. Most sources give October 13, 1930. Only a few were built. One of them went to Canadian Airways, who used it to supply remote mines in Canada. There the aircraft got the fitting nickname “Flying Boxcar”.

For passenger service, one engine was not enough. Lufthansa, still written Luft Hansa at the time, pushed for a three-engine version, and the Bolivian customer Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano also wanted its aircraft with three engines. This is how the Ju 52/3m came about, with one engine in the fuselage nose and one on each wing. It first flew on March 7, 1932, and in May 1932 Lufthansa took over its first aircraft.

Technically, the Ju 52 built on ideas Junkers had already established with the Junkers F 13: all-metal, cantilever wing, corrugated skin. What was new was the scale. The Ju 52/3m was much larger and could be fitted with floats as a passenger, cargo or seaplane.

Corrugated skin and double wing: the technology of Tante Ju

Two features make the Ju 52 unmistakable:

• The corrugated skin: The ribs in the thin light alloy act like stiffeners. The skin thus carries part of the loads and gets by with less internal bracing. The price is higher drag. Competition from the US, above all the Douglas DC-3, relied on smooth monocoque construction and was faster as a result. How the two concepts developed is also shown in the article on the history of the DC-3.
• The “double wing”: Behind the trailing edge of each wing, a narrow, offset control surface runs along the entire span. The outer part works as an aileron, the inner as a flap. With the flaps extended, the minimum speed drops considerably, which explains the good short takeoff and landing characteristics.

Feature	Ju 52/3m (typical figures)
Crew	3
Passengers	15–17
Length	18.50 m (19.40 m with floats)
Wingspan	29.25 m
Height	4.65 m
Wing area	110.5 m²
Empty weight	5,720 kg
Maximum takeoff weight	10,500 kg
Engines	3 radial engines, including BMW 132 or Pratt & Whitney Hornet
Cruising speed	around 180 km/h
Top speed	around 290 km/h
Range	around 1,200–1,300 km

The values vary by variant and source. They show well, though, what league the Ju 52 played in: an aircraft for medium distances, not for records.

Lufthansa’s standard aircraft

At Lufthansa, the Ju 52/3m quickly became the most important type. As early as the end of 1932 the airline ordered more aircraft, and in 1938, according to common figures, roughly three quarters of Lufthansa’s traffic was flown with Tante Ju. In total, depending on the source, Lufthansa operated just under 190 to over 230 examples over the years. The aircraft bore the names of well-known pilots and flew on the European route network, with floats also on seaplane routes in Scandinavia.

For airline history the Ju 52 is important because it shaped scheduled service of the 1930s in Germany and many other countries. Junkers exported the aircraft to numerous airlines in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia. Anyone interested in the infrastructure of the time will find the right background in the article on the history of Tempelhof Airport: Berlin Tempelhof was Lufthansa’s hub in this period. How things went on with today’s Lufthansa is in the airline profile.

War and the postwar years

The Ju 52 was designed from the start so that it could also be used militarily. In the Spanish Civil War and in World War II it was the German Luftwaffe’s standard transport aircraft, dropped paratroopers, towed gliders and supplied encircled troops. Losses were enormous, for example in operations in Norway, the Netherlands, on Crete and at Stalingrad. Lufthansa, too, flew the Ju 52 until May 1945.

After the war the story was not over. The Ju 52 and its licensed versions kept flying for many years:

• Spain: CASA built 170 aircraft under license as the CASA 352 and 352L. The Spanish air force used them into the 1970s.
• France: Amiot built several hundred examples during and after the war, after 1945 under the name AAC.1 Toucan.
• Airlines in Europe: British European Airways, Soviet civil operators and, in Norway, DNL and later SAS, among others, still flew the Ju 52, there until 1956.
• Portugal and South America: The Portuguese air force used the Ju 52 until the early 1970s; in South America individual aircraft flew in civil service into the 1960s, for example in Ecuador.
• Switzerland: The Swiss air force bought three Ju 52s in 1939 and used them for around 40 years, until the early 1980s. These three aircraft later became the basis of Ju-Air.

Two flying monuments: Ju-Air and D-AQUI

From the 1980s on, Tante Ju enjoyed a second career as a sightseeing-flight classic. Two operators shaped this phase.

Ju-Air in Dübendorf

In Switzerland, the Ju-Air association, based at Dübendorf military airfield, took over the three retired air force aircraft HB-HOP, HB-HOS and HB-HOT. The first sightseeing flights took off from 1983, and for a time a CASA 352 built in Spain, HB-HOY, supplemented the fleet. Carried by many volunteers, Ju-Air carried numerous passengers over decades, mostly on Alpine and sightseeing flights. Anyone who wants to see the roots of this scene today will find the right place at the Flieger-Flab-Museum Dübendorf; the spot Flieger Flab Museum at Dübendorf airfield describes the situation on site.

D-AQUI and the Lufthansa Berlin Foundation

The best-known German Tante Ju has an eventful biography. The aircraft with construction number 5489 was built in Dessau in 1936 and delivered to Lufthansa as D-AQUI, initially as a seaplane. It then flew in Norway with DNL and later SAS, from 1957 in Ecuador and finally in the US, where it appeared at airshows as “Iron Annie”. In 1984 Lufthansa bought the aircraft back and had it restored in Hamburg by what is now Lufthansa Technik. From 1986 D-AQUI flew sightseeing flights all over Germany again, later under the umbrella of the Deutsche Lufthansa Berlin-Stiftung.

A detail for registration fans: officially the aircraft was registered as D-CDLH. The letter after the “D-” in Germany depends on the weight class, and “A” did not suit the Ju 52. “D-AQUI” was therefore only a historical marking on the livery. How this system came about is explained in the history of German aircraft registrations.

2018: the year the sightseeing flights ended

The year 2018 brought the end of both programs.

On August 4, 2018, the Ju-Air aircraft HB-HOT crashed at Piz Segnas in the Glarus Alps on the return flight from Locarno to Dübendorf. All 20 people on board died. The Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board SUST presented its final report in January 2021. As the direct cause it named risky flight handling: the crew flew low and slow in a narrow valley basin with no way out. Turbulence put the aircraft into an aerodynamic stall that the pilots could no longer recover from at the low altitude. The report also criticized a center of gravity behind the permissible limit, shortcomings in technology and safety culture, and the oversight by the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (BAZL).

The interim report of November 2018 had already found corrosion and cracks in the structure which, though not causal to the accident, kept Ju-Air’s other two Ju 52s on the ground. In March 2019, the BAZL withdrew Ju-Air’s permission for commercial passenger flights with the Ju 52. The restoration of HB-HOS was halted as uneconomical in 2022. In 2023 the aircraft went symbolically for one franc to the Luftfahrtmuseum Wernigerode. HB-HOP stands in the Flieger-Flab-Museum in Dübendorf; considerations of reactivating it were abandoned in 2024.

D-AQUI also stayed on the ground. In August 2018 its flights ended after findings on the structure, and in April 2019 Lufthansa decided to retire it for good. In 2020 the disassembled aircraft came to Paderborn/Lippstadt. The plan is to show it publicly in Frankfurt together with a Lockheed Constellation. Whether and in what form that is possible at the time of your visit, you should check beforehand with the foundation or Lufthansa.

Where you can see Tante Ju today

Because the big sightseeing-flight programs are history, the museum is today the safest place for an encounter with the Ju 52. A selection:

Place	What awaits you
Technikmuseum Hugo Junkers, Dessau	Original Ju 52/3m that sank after an emergency landing on the ice of a lake near Narvik, was recovered in 1986 and came to Dessau in 1995. Plus replicas of the F 13 and J 1.
Flieger-Flab-Museum Dübendorf	The former Ju-Air and air force aircraft HB-HOP.
Luftfahrtmuseum Wernigerode	HB-HOS, which arrived there disassembled in 2023.
Norsk Luftfartsmuseum, Bodø	A Ju 52/3m as part of Norwegian aviation history.
Deutsches Museum, Munich	An aircraft from French licensed production (Amiot AAC.1 Toucan).
Polish Aviation Museum, Kraków	Also a Toucan from French production.

Exhibitions change, aircraft move into storage or restoration workshops. Before your visit, check the museum’s website to see whether the aircraft is currently on display.

Flying Ju 52s number only a handful worldwide, including individual examples and CASA-built aircraft in France and the US. Whether one of them shows up at a fly-in is usually decided only at short notice. Events like the Hahnweide vintage fly-in are good places to look out for historic aircraft. How to identify vintage aircraft in the sky reliably is shown in the guide recognizing vintage aircraft in the sky.

How to recognize a Ju 52

Even if you rarely get to see one: the Ju 52 is among the easiest aircraft of all to identify.

On the CASA 352 and Toucan, fuselage and wings are almost identical; differences lie mainly in engines and equipment. For photos, a rather long shutter speed is worthwhile so the propellers do not look frozen. The right values are in the article photographing propellers.

What to keep in mind on a museum visit

• Read up on its origin: Many Ju 52s have several lives behind them, with changing registrations, operators and names. The information boards or the museum’s website tell you which story is standing in front of you.
• Original or licensed build: A large share of the surviving examples come from Spanish or French production. That is no flaw, but an important difference for your collection.
• Observe photo rules: Museums have their own rules for tripods, flash and barriers. When in doubt, ask.
• Keep volunteering in mind: Many restorations run on volunteers. If you want to pitch in yourself, the article volunteering at aviation museums offers a way in.

Conclusion

Like hardly any other aircraft, the Junkers Ju 52 connects several eras: the dawn of scheduled service in the 1930s, the dark war years, the long postwar career with airlines and air forces and finally the time as a flying monument. With the crash of HB-HOT in 2018 and the retirement of D-AQUI, the era in which anyone could buy a ticket for a Tante Ju sightseeing flight came to an end. What remains are well-preserved museum pieces and a small number of airworthy aircraft whose appearances are true moments of luck for spotters.