MTU Aero Engines Brand Guidelines: BMW’s 1934 Allach Engine Works to a Munich DAX Listing

A 1934 spin-off and the war years at Allach.

MTU Aero Engines dates its formal beginning to 1934, when BMW spun off its aero-engine business as BMW Flugmotorenbau GmbH. The company’s history page goes back further, to the engine works Karl Rapp founded in Munich in 1913, which became Bayerische Motorenwerke in 1917. German Wikipedia, citing the historian Till Lorenzen’s study of BMW as an aero-engine maker, says the 1934 spin-off came partly at the urging of the Reich Air Ministry, which wanted the Luftwaffe’s rearmament and its demand for BMW engines kept out of BMW’s published accounts, and partly from management’s wish to contain the risks of a business built around rearmament. In 1936 BMW opened a dedicated aero-engine plant at Allach on the edge of Munich. That site is MTU’s headquarters today.

From 1940 the Allach works mass-produced the BMW 801 radial engine, which German Wikipedia says powered the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter and the Dornier Do 217 bomber. The war years at Allach rested on forced labour. German Wikipedia, citing the historian Constanze Werner’s study of war economy and forced labour at BMW, says forced labourers were used on a large scale, so that by 1943 the German core workforce was a minority of 29 per cent. In February 1943 a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp was set up directly beside the BMW site, and its prisoners worked in production or built bunkers on the factory grounds. MTU’s own history states that between 1940 and 1945 several thousand foreign and forced labourers, concentration-camp prisoners from more than 25 nations and Russian prisoners of war were forced to work at Allach and lived in neighbouring camps in terrible conditions. MTU says that from 1999 it and the BMW Group had this chapter researched in two dissertations under a joint project called “Gemeinsam Erinnern,” or Remembering Together.

From licence work to MTU.

American troops occupied the Allach works in April 1945. German Wikipedia says they used it as a repair shop for army vehicles and guns, which spared the factory full dismantling, and MTU says no aircraft engines were built there for about a decade. BMW returned to engine development in January 1954, according to English Wikipedia, and in 1957 founded BMW Triebwerkbau GmbH at Allach. Its first work was under licence: from 1959, English Wikipedia and the company record, it built General Electric’s J79 for the German Air Force’s F-104 Starfighters.

Ownership then moved away from BMW. MAN took half of BMW Triebwerkbau in 1960 and the rest in 1965, merging it into MAN Turbo GmbH. On 11 July 1969, MTU says, the engine activities of Daimler-Benz and MAN were combined as Motoren- und Turbinen-Union. The new group had two halves: MTU München for aircraft engines and MTU Friedrichshafen for diesel engines. The Friedrichshafen business later became a separate company and is now part of Rolls-Royce Power Systems; it is a different firm from MTU Aero Engines.

The Munich side grew through partnerships. English Wikipedia says MTU, Rolls-Royce and FiatAvio formed Turbo-Union in October 1969 to build the RB199 engine for the Panavia Tornado. MTU says it joined International Aero Engines, maker of the V2500 for the Airbus A320 family, in 1983, and the Eurojet consortium for the Eurofighter’s EJ200 in 1986. With Safran and Rolls-Royce it is a partner in the TP400-D6 for the Airbus A400M, which MTU says is assembled at its Ludwigsfelde site near Berlin. German Wikipedia describes the company’s specialities as high-pressure compressors and low-pressure turbines. Maintenance became a second business in 1979, when MTU Maintenance Hannover opened at Langenhagen; German Wikipedia lists MTU Maintenance sites in Germany, Canada, China, Serbia, the United States, Brazil and Australia.

How aerospace suppliers present themselves.

Aerospace suppliers sell to a small number of buyers, and their imagery is built for engineers, airlines and investors rather than for passengers. The product is usually hidden inside someone else’s aircraft, so the pictures tend to show it before it disappears: an engine bolted to a test stand, a single fan blade lit in a studio, a fuselage section on a factory floor, or a cutaway drawing that opens up the layers of a turbofan or a landing-gear leg.

Factories are part of the story. Clean rooms, composite lay-up tables and long assembly halls appear again and again, often with people in them: apprentices, engineers and technicians in overalls, shown at work rather than posing. Many of these companies are joint ventures, partners or subcontractors on the same programmes, so a single engine or wing can carry the work of several firms, each telling its own part of it.

The trade has its own stages. The Paris Air Show at Le Bourget and the Farnborough show in England alternate year by year, and suppliers take chalets and stands there alongside the aircraft makers they serve. Services after delivery are a large part of the business too, and the language of aftermarket support, spare parts and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) runs through their websites and reports.

Corporate reports often put an aircraft on the cover, even when the company makes none of it. Behind that shared look sit very different histories: century-old engine makers, plants sold off by aircraft builders, conglomerate spin-outs and private-equity buyouts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each one, and mark clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Daimler, KKR and the stock market.

In 1985 Daimler-Benz bought MAN’s half of MTU, and in 1989 MTU became part of Deutsche Aerospace, or Dasa, Daimler’s aerospace group. When Dasa merged into EADS in July 2000, German Wikipedia says, MTU was left out because it made engines rather than aircraft, and stayed with DaimlerChrysler; MTU says that this was the moment MTU München took the name MTU Aero Engines. DaimlerChrysler then sold the business to the American private-equity firm KKR, a sale German Wikipedia dates to 2003 and that MTU says took effect on 1 January 2004.

KKR took the company to the stock exchange. MTU Aero Engines shares were first traded on 6 June 2005, and the stock joined the MDAX index on 19 September 2005, according to both the company and German Wikipedia. German Wikipedia says KKR sold its remaining shares in January 2006, leaving the company fully in free float, and that MTU moved up into the DAX, the index of Germany’s 30 largest listed companies at the time, on 23 September 2019. It names Lars Wagner, previously the chief technology officer, as chief executive since 1 January 2023.

The company’s own history is direct about its past. Its timeline moves from the Bavarian engine of 1918 to the BMW 801 and then, under its own heading for 1943, to forced labour in engine construction, stating that the suffering of those made to work at Allach has not been forgotten. That makes the war years part of the company’s published story rather than a gap in it, alongside the licence-built J79, the Tornado and the Airbus programmes.

For a design guide, MTU Aero Engines shows how a supplier whose parts sit inside other companies’ engines presents itself through programmes, partners and a dated history that includes its hardest chapter. Compare Hexcel, another supplier to Airbus programmes, and Airbus, whose A320 family and A400M fly with engines MTU helps build. For this guide we use a deep navy, a cool mist and a turbine-steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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