Else Kocher

Else Kocher (born July 29, 1902 in Mannheim ; † July 29, 1994 there ) was Baden's first female pilot and first German female master in skill flying.

Life

Grave of Else Kocher.

Else Kocher was born in 1902 as the only child of Fritz and Katharina Kocher in Mannheim-Feudenheim . Her mother died in 1912. In addition to the usual schooling up to secondary school, she was taught dance, piano, gymnastics and ballet. In 1921 she went to Munich for several months and continued her ballet training there. A ballet master of the theater manager Saladin Schmitt noticed her and wanted to hire her as an assistant director at the theater in Duisburg . Else Kocher's father, however, did not support this project, refused his signature and thus forced his daughter to pursue a different professional career. He would have liked to have stayed at home with her. Else Kocher did her Abitur in Mannheim, where she also attended engineering school , graduated as an interpreter for French, Spanish and English in Heidelberg and financed herself during this time with a job at the Mannheim telegraph office ( Lanz- Villa).

In 1923 she married Hermann Roos , whose name she adopted. At the end of the 1920s, he moved to Colombia for professional reasons , but wanted Else to follow him as soon as he had settled down there and established himself professionally.

Else Kocher already got her motorcycle license in 1923 and her husband encouraged her in a letter from Colombia to get her pilot's license during the time of separation. She acquired this at the age of 27 as a member of the "Badisch-Palatinate Aviation Association Mannheim eV" at Mannheim Airport in December 1929 as the first woman in Mannheim and in Baden. She financed her flight ticket with translations of specialist texts and other paperwork. Afterwards she also wanted to acquire the license for passenger aircraft , but this was only allowed for men.

In 1931 she followed her husband Hermann Roos to Colombia. Divorced, she came back to Mannheim after the Second World War and again took her maiden name. She worked as an interpreter and took care of her family. Some time later she moved to Katowice .

In 1983 Else Kocher took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok , a long-cherished wish of hers. She crossed over to Yokohama and flew from Tokyo to the Philippines . On this flight she celebrated her 81st birthday and was invited by the crew into the cockpit to spend the flight there until landing. Else Kocher spent her twilight years in the senior citizens' residence on Moritzberg in Hildesheim and in the Joseph-Bauer-Haus in Mannheim-Käfertal . She died on her 92nd birthday and was buried in the main cemetery in Mannheim .

Flight training

In the summer of 1929, a period of three months of training was scheduled for acquiring an aircraft pilot's license for powered flight. In addition, other conditions had to be met, such as 20 solo flights, an interim inspection that required three target landings and five eights, a one-hour high-altitude flight at an altitude of 2000 m, an overland flight with two landings of at least 450 km and a triangular flight. Before registering for the flight ticket, Roos had to present a medical certificate and a confirmation of participation in a free balloon ride in addition to the sports badge .

The fact that women operated an airplane at the time was not an everyday occurrence and so her classmates ridiculed her. The situation was also new for her flight instructor, because she was the first woman he was to teach to fly. Since you could not afford a fitter, it was the duty of the student pilots to look after the machine. Else Roos was tolerated in this work, but by no means spared. In addition to being responsible for the machine, she was the only woman on the field to work on the “clothes box” for the entire team and to take care of the parachutes. Only after successfully completing her solo flight was she accepted by her classmates as a comrade.

The flight lessons were designed in such a way that each of the students was allowed to fly three laps around the field with the teacher and were allowed to take off and land three times. Each lap lasted about three to four minutes. At the beginning of the training, the students sat in the front, then later in the back to prepare for the solo flight. These school rounds were flown with a post-war RK 9 “warbler” ( Raab-Katzenstein ) double-decker . Powerful aircraft were not allowed to be built in Germany after the First World War due to the Treaty of Versailles , and so only weakly motorized machines were available. The "warbler", however, was always in need of repair: the undercarriage buckled on landings, the wings got cracks, the propeller broke. Roos was able to take her intermediate exam on the biplane, but her final exam would have failed due to the technical conditions of the aircraft. In the autumn a second machine came with which the students could fly: a "Klemm" Kl 31 , a low-wing aircraft with plywood surfaces and a radial engine from the Salmson brand . With this technical equipment an altitude of 2000 m was possible again. But there were always problems with the clamp as well. Due to the engine, Else Roos first had to glide and then land on one of her high-altitude flights. Since the altimeter showed no more than 2000 m, she did not know that it was actually already at 2250 m. This only became clear when the barograph was removed. She was then banned from starting for four weeks.

On December 18, 1929, Else Roos took her final flight test. A flight from Mannheim to Freiburg and then the return flight to Mannheim with a stopover in Karlsruhe was planned. Equipped with a roll card, tour counter and altimeter, Else started her flight. Since she soon lost her orientation due to her non-functioning on-board equipment, she orientated herself on the Rhine. Due to the deteriorating visibility in the winter sky, this did not succeed and so she made an emergency landing on French farmland near Saint-Louis . They picked up French military vehicles from the winter cold. Since she was guilty of violating French territory, it was suspected that there was an espionage affair and her entire plane was searched. Finally, a French pilot, who sent a telegram to Mannheim, and three Swiss sports pilots who took care of the Klemm helped her. Meanwhile, the unusual incident was negotiated in Paris. When the story of the emergency landing was finally believed, she was allowed to fly to Birsfelden , Switzerland , to spend the night there. The next morning she ended her overland flight. The stopover in Karlsruhe had been waived because the emergency landing had already been successful. After this little adventure, Else Roos was the first woman in Mannheim and Baden to receive a pilot's license and was allowed to call herself a pilot. For two years she was then active in the Badisch-Palatinate Aviation Association until she left Germany.

Sporting successes

Else Kocher joined the “1. German ladies aerobatics championship combined with skill competition and Opel star flight ”in Bonn-Hangelar together with Melitta Schiller , Marga von Etzdorf , Liesel Bach , Elly Beinhorn , Margrit Fußbahn , Katja Heidrich , Alix Willisch and Luise Hoffmann . She won first prize and thus became the first German female champion in the flight of skill.

She also took part in the Karlsruhe Grand Flight Day on June 1, 1930 with 20,000 spectators, where she met Ernst Udet, among others . In December 1930 she was awarded the Silver Sports Aviation Badge for her cross-country flights.

After the Second World War, until 1956 no sport aircraft were allowed to fly, so that Else Kocher could no longer pursue the skill flight.

literature

• Else Kocher: A woman learns to fly. In: Paul Lochs (Ed.): How it was once in our time. Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern 1980, ISBN 3-7966-0558-3 , pp. 266-272.
• Evelyn Zegenhagen: dashing German girls. Aviators between 1918 and 1945. Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-8353-0179-9 .
• Ernst Probst: Queens of the Skies: Biographies of famous female pilots. GRIN Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-638-93415-2 .
• Susanne Schlösser: A courageous pilot . In: Moments. State Gazette BW 2010. Accessed April 16, 2020.

Web links

• Mannheim in old pictures. Facebook group with city impressions from private sources.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} A courageous pilot. Website of the State Gazette BW. Retrieved May 12, 2020.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Mannheimer Morgen, "Flying high with the warbler" by birm; June 5, 1986, no p.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Else Kocher: A woman learns to fly. In: Paul Lochs (Ed.): How it was once in our time. Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern 1980, p. 266.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Mannheimer Morgen, “Notgelandet during the flight test in Alsace” by Jan Cerny; January 12, 1980, no p.
5. ↑ Mannheimer Morgen, obituary, August 2, 1994, no p.
6. ↑ Else Kocher: A woman learns to fly. In: Paul Lochs (Ed.): How it was once in our time. Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern 1980, p. 268.
7. ↑ Else Kocher: A woman learns to fly. In: Paul Lochs (Ed.): How it was once in our time. Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern 1980, p. 269 f.
8. ↑ Else Kocher: A woman learns to fly. In: Paul Lochs (Ed.): How it was once in our time. Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern 1980, pp. 270-272.
9. ↑ Else Kocher: A woman learns to fly. In: Paul Lochs (Ed.): How it was once in our time. Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern 1980, p. 272.
10. ↑ Liesel Bach - the beginnings. Website of the Cologne Aviation Archives. Retrieved May 12, 2020.
11. ↑ Chronikstar online database. Marchivum website. Retrieved May 12, 2020.
12. ↑ City Chronicle Karlsruhe. Website of the city of Karlsruhe. Retrieved May 12, 2020.
13. ↑ Else Kocher: A woman learns to fly. In: Paul Lochs (Ed.): How it was once in our time. Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern 1980, p. 271.
14. ↑ ^{a b} Mannheimer Morgen, “Auf Schwingen to great successes.” By Eck; August 3, 1994, no p.