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Old 15th March 2012, 00:56
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Boris von Loutzkoy and balloon tyres; But what aircraft?

Hi

A photo of this odd looking aircraft is currently on eBay. The seller added that the constructor (in top right hand corner) was one Boris von Loutzkoy. The name was unfamiliar to me, but after some work on the net I found this man to be quite an eccentric engineer-inventor. Much is not known about him, much is debatable. There is for-instance at least three different spellings of his name. By the time of this 1933 invention he was also described as a Baron, but none of the sources that I have found suggest how this could have come about.

It would appear that he was born in Russia in 1865. After beginning formal education at home he travelled to Munich to complete his professional qualifications. Soon he became a leading figure in the early motor-car industry, with connections to Daimler. His motor-vehicle designs included armoured cars which he attempted to sell to the Tsarist regime. Although he evidently missed his home country he knew that his own professional career would not prosper there.


During the First World War he was imprisoned at Spandau as an enemy national. After the war his life was obscure. The ‘Baron’ and ‘von’ seem to have been added to his name at this time. One source ‘suggests’ that he may have died in 1920, but a list of fairly wacky patents suggests that this was not the case. One area of particular interest was a balloon wheel. A design of 1932 was a rather futuristic ‘monotrack vehicle’ fitted with two of these wheels. Loutzkoy also believed that similar wheels could be fitted to an aeroplane and would allow the aircraft to land on land or water.

This seems to be Loutzkoy’s last design, and was featured in the magazine Modern Mechanix, 1934. His date of death was unknown to the sources that I looked at.

Loutzkoy did not (probably) then design the actual aircraft in the photo. But what is this aircraft? It looks a little like a Klemm L 20. This was originally the Daimler L 20. Given Loutzkoy’s earlier close relationship with Daimler this could make sense. I think that there may be a Klemm logo on the fuselage…but can anyone confirm this?

Ian

sources; http://www.oavto.ru/names/7879.html
http://trucks.autoreview.ru/archive/2009/02/luckoi/
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