Ju 88 A variants

[CJE]

Originally Posted by ju55dk

Attached an extract from BA/MA Freiburg RM 7/2378:
Zusammenstellung der in der Luftwaffe eingeführten Flugzeugmuster mit Erklärendem Text ihrer Baureihenbezeichnung Stand 01. April 1941.

Junker

Thank you, very interesting.
A-9, A-1/Trop...? Wasn't the A-1 phased out when the LW began its operations over the Med?

[Graham Boak]

Originally Posted by CJE

Thank you, very interesting.
A-9, A-1/Trop...? Wasn't the A-1 phased out when the LW began its operations over the Med?

To me, what this shows is that when the matter of tropicalised variants first arose, Junkers/RLM simply looked at the major sub-variants in service (or planned) and allocated new numbers to each. The A-1 was in service therefore gained a new tropicalised variant. It may well be that no A-1s were ever tropicalised, so this sub-variant "did not exist" in terms of real airframes to this standard.

It seems that in practice, these new numbers were generally ignored and the "/trop" suffix applied. So the question "did such exist" has two answers: yes, in the master list of possible variants; no, in that aircraft were not so referred to in practice. Except, it seems, that some were.

Could it be that the terms were used interchangeably (Hypothesis A)? Or were the new designations only applied to new-build airframes , whereas most were modified from existing airframes and thus gained the "/trop" suffix (Hypothesis B)? Is it possible to test these rival ideas from the known Werkenummern or StammKennZeichen?

The posting above suggests that examples of A-10s came from a wide spread of WN. This does not look to me like a specific production run, so favours hypothesis B.
Do we have adjacent (or close) WN with different designations? If we find an A-10 listed in the middle of a run of A-5/trops, this would suggest a casual approach to the use of such designations, again favouring B.
Sadly, it is easy to conceive of the A-5 production line, with some randomly-dispersed aircraft receiving tropicalisation on the line and rolling out as A-10s, whereas others being converted later as A-5/trops, with a resulting smorgasbord of numbers and variants!

Do we know if any tropicalisation was applied on the production line rather than at post-production centres? Or was there a mix here, too?

Moving on to Ed's comments on rebuilds/hybrids. I'd argue that the designations only matter in so far as they provide a short-hand term for useful information. These normally only matter in two areas: the combat capabilities and the spares requirements. For obvious reasons, the direction is almost always forwards: earlier types are modified to later standards. Put later wingtips and later engines into an A-1 and it becomes an A-4, to all practical purposes; it can operate alongside A-4s, can use A-4 manuals and be supported by A-4 spares. Similar problems arise along the length of the A-4 run: there will have been many modifications introduced over the years, and a late A-4 will have differed in many small ways from an earlier example. The Luftwaffe, like all air forces, had a bureaucratic tail that kept track of such matters. Each aircraft will have been monitored and cared for as appropriate to its build standard and fit. Hybrids are just examples with a slightly more complex history.