Arthur Neumann

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Arthur Neumann (1923)

Arthur Neumann (born January 17, 1890 in Hamburg , † March 4, 1974 in Rostock ) was a German pilot and pioneer of polar flight. In 1923 he was the first person to pilot a powered airplane north of the 80th parallel.

Life

Early years

Neumann initially became a seaman. During the First World War , he initially served as a non-commissioned officer in the Imperial Navy . He became a fitter in the naval aviation and eventually a pilot. After the war he turned to civil aviation and in 1921 became a pilot at Junkers Luftverkehr AG , where he was soon considered to be an "experienced northern country pilot ".

The Junkers-Spitzbergen expedition

Arthur Neumann (2nd from left) with other expedition participants in front of the D 260 Eisvogel
Arthur Neumann's grave

In the spring of 1923 Neumann received an offer from the management of the Junkers factories to take part in an auxiliary expedition for the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen as a pilot of an F 13 monoplane . Amundsen had acquired a Larsen JL-6 , a replica of the Junkers F 13 , in the United States and was planning to fly it from Point Barrow , Alaska , over the North Pole to Spitsbergen . However, the experts at Junkers doubted the possibility of increasing the range of the machine to the required 3400 km with additional tanks. In order to prevent damage to the company's image, it was decided to send an airplane to Spitsbergen, which was to be used to set up depots of food, fuel, medicines and equipment on the pack ice north of Spitsbergen and in the event that Amundsen had to make an emergency landing before reaching its destination, to be available for further rescue measures.

Neumann accepted the offer and at the beginning of June 1923 traveled as a participant in a small expedition with the dismantled and packed aircraft D 260 Eisvogel via Bergen to Tromsø . Shortly before the arrival of their ship, the members of the expedition received the news that Amundsen had canceled his pole flight. After consulting the Junkers factories, it was decided to continue the journey. The Swiss travel writer and photographer Walter Mittelholzer was supposed to use the cockpit of the F 13 flown by Neumann to take photos and films of Spitsbergen. The photographs should serve to test the possibilities of mapping hard-to-reach areas with a photogrammetric method on the basis of oblique aerial photographs . The film was used to create the commercial in the Junkers plane over Svalbard .

On July 4, 1923, the expedition moved into vacant buildings at the Norwegian radio station at Grønfjord, 2.5 km south of Green Harbor. Neumann carried out test flights with increasing flight distance on the following days. On July 8th, Neumann and Mittelholzer started a big sightseeing flight over a distance of about 1000 km. Although the engine was causing problems, they reached northeastern country - passing the Hinlopen Strait - and exceeded the 80th parallel at the island of Kvaløya. Following the pack ice edge north of West Spitzbergen to the west, the kingfisher flew to Danskøya and swiveled there in a south-south-west direction to return to its starting point after almost seven hours of flight time. Unfortunately, the damage to the engine did not allow another start.

Neumann and Mittelholzer had undertaken the most northerly powered flight in the world to date. The first aerial photographs of Svalbard were taken. Both men later expressed the view that with better preparation and an intact aircraft, they could have reached the pole.

Late years

Even after his return, Neumann worked for Junkers Luftverkehrs AG and its successor, Deutsche Luft Hansa AG . He flew to Iceland, among other places. In 1929 he trained Soviet pilots in instrument flight . Neumann's total flight distance corresponded to 27 times the circumference of the earth.

Arthur Neumann spent his last years in the Rostock district of Warnemünde . His grave is in the New Cemetery there.

Web links

Commons : Arthur Neumann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ W. Mittelholzer: The first flights in the Arctic. In: W. Mittelholzer (Ed.): In the airplane towards the North Pole. Junkers' auxiliary expedition for Amundsen to Spitzbergen 1923 , pp. 51–106, here: p. 60.
  2. a b Ewald Thoms: A Pinch of the Arctic. In: Fliegerrevue, 1970, No. 9, pp. 364–368.
  3. In the Junkers plane over Spitzbergen on YouTube , accessed on April 24, 2018.
  4. ^ W. Mittelholzer: The first flights in the Arctic. In: W. Mittelholzer (Ed.): In the airplane towards the North Pole. Junkers' auxiliary expedition for Amundsen to Spitzbergen 1923 , pp. 51–106, here: p. 96.