From bird to insect

As both a classic car owner and a military aviation enthusiast, I really appreciated your Icon column in Octane 185 about the Fieseler Fi 156 Storch .The brilliant career of this excellent STOL aircraft didn’t end with the fall of the Third Reich.

During the war, Germans delegated Storch production to the French firm Morane-Saulnier and, after the liberation, the M-S factory at Puteaux was entrusted with continuing production by the French Military Air Force. When the original wartime stocks of Argus air-cooled inverted V8 engines were depleted, the French company adapted the aircraft to fit radial engines such as the Renault 6Q, the Salmson 9AB and the American Jacobs R-755.

Under the new denomination of Morane-Saulnier MS500

Criquet (‘cricket’), the aircraft served for a long time with French authorities and saw much action during the wars in Indochina and in Algeria, sometimes modified with a MAC34T machine gun set to fire out of a cockpit side window. Morane-Saulnier also substituted the wooden wings with a metal airframe, to strengthen and adapt the aircraft to the harsh climate of the tropics.

A total of 925 Criquets were built by M-S until 1965, and the Czechoslovakian firm Mraz and Romania’s ICAR also produced the Storch for a brief period.

In November 1946, two Swiss Aviation Storchs took part in the search and rescue operation for an American military C-53 Skytrooper transport aircraft that had crashed on the Gauli glacier. Captain Victor Hug and Major Pista Hitz managed to land the two ski-equipped Storchs directly on the snow-covered glacier, before carrying the injured C-53 crew along with high-ranking passengers to safety in a total of eight flights. This bold rescue much improved the then-strained diplomatic relations between Switzerland and the USA.