Schopf Brand Guidelines: Ostfildern’s 1948 Tug Maker, Folded Into Goldhofer

An engineer’s design office, then a factory.

Schopf began as a one-man design office. In 1945 the mechanical engineer Jörg Schopf opened an office to develop shovel loaders, and SCHOPF Maschinenbau GmbH was formally founded in 1948, when production began, according to a company profile published in October 2008 by Ground Support Worldwide, the trade title that appears on AviationPros. The same article places the start of production at Zinsholz, where the firm began building construction machines in 1948; English Wikipedia also gives 1948 as the founding year.

Its first market was underground, not on the apron. Through the 1950s the company concentrated on heavy-duty mining, and Ground Support Worldwide credits it with developing the first four-wheel-drive shovel loader. Construction and quarrying vehicles came first; underground wheeled loaders followed, and the magazine reported in 2008 that they were still at work in salt, coal, iron-ore, copper and gold mines. A mining range stayed in the catalogue for decades: Schopf launched a low-profile underground loader, the SFL 60 XLP, at the Bauma exhibition in April 2007, and Airside International still described underground loaders as part of its portfolio at the time of the Goldhofer takeover.

Aviation arrived with the growth of civil air travel. By the 1960s Schopf had delivered its first aircraft tow tractor, the 2008 profile says, and the business settled at Ostfildern, near Stuttgart, where design, manufacture and sales were all carried out by a team of about 130 people.

Ownership changed after the founder stepped back. Jörg Schopf retired in 1983; nearly a decade later the company was under British ownership, which the article does not name, and in 2003 its chief executive Hermann Brüggemann and finance director Claus Habeil bought it in a management buyout, returning it, in the magazine’s words, to German hands. In June 2008 the company marked sixty years in business with festivities themed “60 years of power.”

Towbar tugs, a remote pusher and a loader.

Schopf’s name at airports rested on conventional towbar tractors. Its F-series covered aircraft from small to very large; Ground Support Worldwide listed the then-new F110, F160 and F300 tugs in 2008 and said the larger F396 had been developed further for operators preparing for the Airbus A380.

The range broadened in the 1990s. Under British ownership, management added cargo equipment and aircraft passenger stairs, introduced through acquisition, the 2008 profile says. Another addition was the PowerPush, a remotely controlled towbarless pushback unit that works on the main landing gear without lifting the aircraft, for aircraft of up to 100 tonnes. Schopf also redesigned its seven-tonne container and pallet loader, the Loadstar.

Most of the customers were abroad. According to the same article, about 90 percent of Schopf’s aviation output went for export, to airlines, ground handlers, airports and military users including NATO, with deliveries to more than 160 countries. In 2006 the company won orders from two British customers for a total of 80 tow tractors. Airside International later gave the same figure of about 160 countries when it reported the Goldhofer deal.

The company’s own line was short. “We have the Power” had been Schopf’s slogan in the years before 2008, Ground Support Worldwide reported, and the 60th-anniversary event in Ostfildern included a 50-year-old shovel loader from the company’s first years, still in working order. The firm also ran apprenticeships and student projects, including work with the polytechnic in nearby Esslingen, the magazine said.

Design and documentation.

Ground support equipment is the machinery that works around a parked aircraft: tugs and pushback tractors, belt loaders at the hold doors, cargo loaders for containers and pallets, de-icers, catering trucks raised to the galley doors and passenger stairs. Its buyers are airlines, airports, cargo carriers, ground handlers and air forces, the customers that makers such as TLD and Oshkosh AeroTech name on their own websites.

The makers in this field present their machines where they work, on the apron: a tug pushing back an airliner at dusk, a belt loader pressed against a cargo door, a de-icing boom reaching over a wing in falling snow, a catering truck lifted level with a galley. Product pages show the equipment at work beside the aircraft it serves.

Trade shows are the other stage. inter airport Europe, held in Munich, is where Oshkosh AeroTech showed its boarding bridges and gate equipment in October 2025, and the International GSE Expo in Las Vegas is where it unveiled a compact deicer the month before. Makers also announce milestone deliveries — a numbered loader or tractor handed to a named operator — as press releases with photographs on the ramp.

Much of the current messaging is about electric and autonomous equipment: TLD runs a programme it calls “Leaner & Greener,” and Oshkosh AeroTech promotes battery-powered charging carts. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name folded into Goldhofer.

Schopf’s independence ended on 1 January 2013, when Goldhofer of Memmingen took over the Schopf group — Schopf Maschinenbau GmbH and Schopf Rofan GmbH, both of Ostfildern — according to German Wikipedia, citing Goldhofer’s own history page. Airside International reported that the deal followed about six months of negotiation, that the group had roughly 160 employees, and that the sale was the choice of Hermann Brüggemann, the retiring managing director and former majority shareholder. Goldhofer, which already made towbarless tractors, said the towbar range let it offer a complete programme; its chief executive Stefan Fuchs called it “one-stop shopping.” The two companies first appeared together at inter airport Europe in 2013, German Wikipedia says.

The Schopf name was then wound down. German Wikipedia says the Bison family, launched as a diesel tractor in 2018 and as an electric version in 2019, succeeded the Schopf F-series; that in 2018 Goldhofer renamed Schopf Maschinenbau GmbH as Goldhofer Airport Technology GmbH; and that the business was consolidated at the Memmingen site in 2021. Goldhofer, which says it was founded in 1705 and is owned by a foundation, now sells conventional and towbarless aircraft tractors under its own name. Schopf is therefore a historic brand: the company no longer trades under that name.

For a design guide, Schopf shows how an engineering name built on one product type — the heavy towbar tug — can be absorbed into a larger group’s brand within a few years of a takeover. Compare Goldhofer, the Memmingen group that bought it, and Mulag, another German maker of airport vehicles. For this guide we use charcoal, steel grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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