Frank Linke-Crawford - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

On July 30 1918, the day after his final victory, he was flying an early model Aviatik D.I in a formation of four. He was shot down in flames by a pair of Italian Hanriot HD.1 fighters, with his plane disintegrating before impact.

Linke-Crawford had separated from his wingmen before engaging the Italians. His plane had spun out before engaging them; he had then recovered and been fired upon. His plane had then fallen apart in midair. Linke-Crawford was accredited as Caporale Aldo Astolfi's sole success as a fighter pilot. Given that the Aviatik was the first fighter manufactured entirely in Austria, and that it initially had a reputation for wing failures during violent aerial maneuvers, there was suspicion that Linke-Crawford had fallen afoul of a faulty airplane rather than an Italian pilot. While the original Aviatik D-I design by Julius von Berg was sound, the Series 115 aircraft license-produced by the Lohner firm at Wien-Floridsdorf were notorious for failures along the wing trailing edges in high speed maneuvers, as Lohner had deviated from Aviatik specifications by employing thinner, lighter wing ribs. At the time of his death, Linke-Crawford was flying one of these defective machines, build number 115.32.

His legacy was best described by one of his peers, Julius Arigi, who was the second ranked Austro-Hungarian ace:

"Linke was both a fine flier and a fine man. He gave his men full support and generally ignored the rules about officers and non-officers having little to do with each other. He often gave away victories to other, less experienced pilots. As you can imagine, the feelings of his men for him were quite strong."

Although Frank Linke-Crawford was originally buried at Pobrežje Cemetery in Maribor, now Slovenia, after the war, in 1919, he was reinterred in Salzburg.