Thanks for sharing. Is anything known about the people behind this project?
Good question. To trace this, you need to go back to the CASA C-207
Azor. The CASA project office director was Pedro Huarte-Mendicoa Larraga. Under him was the German engineer, Dipl. Ing. Hermann Pohlmann who worked at CASA in Madrid from 1950 to 1955.
Pohlmann was better-known for his design work at Junkers from 1923 to 1940. He then moved to the Hamburger Flugzeugbau GmbH as head of the design department (under chief designer Dr. Ing. Richard Vogt). When Walther Blohm reformed the Hamburger Flugzeugbau GmbH in West Germany, Pohlmann returned to Finkenwerder.
According to the BMWi (Bundeswirtschaftsministeriums/Federal Ministry of Economics) - which was considering subsidy funding - the HFB 209 was 'developed in Spain'. But it is not clear whether this refers to the C-207 or suggests that Pohlmann had already begun work on an enlarged, turboprop variant while still in Madrid. As for funding, the 1959 BMWi report regarded the HFB 209 'to be somewhat slow and likely to be quickly overtaken by developments'. [1]
In the end, the BMWi decided against subsidizing either the HFB 209 or the Hamburger jetliner concepts. Design work on these civilian projects ended in 1960.
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[1] "HFB 209, ein in Spanien entwickeltes mittleres Verkehrsflugzeug, das aber etwas langsam sei und vermutlich schnell durch die Entwicklung überholt werde."
The BMWi report also mentions that Lufthansa regarded the HFB 314 rather highly, seeing that jetliner as a potential
Caravelle replacement.