Erich Kloeckner

Erich Klöckner (born November 22, 1913 in Hirtscheid in the Westerwald; † November 20, 2003 in Wolnzach ) was a German aviation pioneer and test pilot . In 1940 he set a world record for gliding to the edge of the stratosphere .

Early years

Memorial stone to his friend and aviation pioneer Willy Pelzner

The son of an oil miller has been enthusiastic about aviation since his youth . He was nicknamed "Flieger-Erich" at an early age. Already in 1928, during his blacksmithing apprenticeship, which he had to complete under pressure from his father, Klöckner and his friend Erwin Sator had secretly assembled a hang glider in the style of the aviation pioneer Willy Pelzner and without the knowledge of his father, who had nothing left for the passion of the then sixteen-year-old, flown. His greatest achievement at the time was a glide flight of around 46 meters.

He acquired the glider A-test in 1929 on a “Zögling”, the B-test in 1931 at the flight club Hellenhahn-Schellenberg . In the same year, the C-test followed at the Dörnberg glider airfield.

Klöckner first visited the center of German glider aviation , the Wasserkuppe , in 1932 and got to know the aviation pioneers Arthur Martens , Fritz Stamer , Hans Jacobs, Alexander Lippisch and “Rhönvater” Carl Oskar Ursinus . On July 23, 1932, he was there in the fatal accident of his role model Günther Groenhoff .

Klöckner applied for engine flight training in Griesheim . He passed the medical examination, but was not accepted. In August 1934 he returned to Dörnberg and was drafted to Gelsenkirchen-Katernberg in April 1935. There he passed the A2 and 1936 in Essen-Mülheim the B2 exam.

The young pilot successfully refused to join the air force after completing his glider training , had a brief interlude at the Gerhard Fieseler works and finally got his first job as a flight pilot at the Orterschule Griesheim . The German Research Institute for Gliding (DFS), founded in 1933 and headed by Walter Georgii, was also based there. Klöckner submitted his application here, but received a rejection. After further positions, including at the Kassel-Rothwesten reconnaissance school, the DFS finally accepted. On November 4, 1937, he took up his position as a test and test pilot for the first time. He stayed there until the institution was closed on April 28, 1945.

Trial and test pilot at DFS

In its early days, Klöckner had to haul gliders with which air force soldiers were trained to become glider pilots. The Luftwaffe needed these pilots to control the new type of DFS 230 , for which a glider association was established at the time, which carried out many successful launching maneuvers in the early days of the coming war. In addition to Hanna Reitsch , Klöckner was also used to test the DFS 230. In addition, the test pilot took the silver C test.

During the 19th Rhön glider flying competition on the Wasserkuppe in 1938, he was responsible for towing and retrieving the eventual winner, Wolfgang Späte.

Stratospheric gliding

In the course of researching extreme updrafts in the vicinity of lee waves , such as those that occur when foehn winds in the lee of the Alps , the DFS scientists wanted to set new altitude records with the glider at the end of 1938. For this purpose, a research group was ordered to Prien on the Chiemsee . From January 2, 1939, Klöckner also belonged to this team. On January 18 of the same year, he was able to use a crane to prove the previously suspected wave updraft. On other flights it advanced to an altitude of around 8,000 meters and on May 18, 1939, it reached the previously unheard of with a glider of 9,210 meters. On October 11, 1940, when the expected foehn weather had set in, he again succeeded in a world record high altitude flight with a glider over the Großglockner massif using special equipment. On that day, a Heinkel He 46 brought Klöckner's crane D-11 (" cloud crane ") from the Ainring airfield to an altitude of around 5700 meters. Upon his return, the embedded measuring instruments confirmed that he at an altitude of 11,460 meters and a temperature of less than -56 ° C up to the edge of the stratosphere was reached. At the time when his flight was aborted by the cold, the machine was still ascending at 2 meters per second. For Klöckner, one consequence of this flight day was frostbite on fingers and earlobes.

The aviation meteorologist and head of DFS, Walter Georgii , wrote about this world record in gliding:

"... that Erich Klöckner, one of the best research pilots in my institute, was able to ascend eleven thousand four hundred meters in wave gliding for the first time on October 11, 1940, and thus show gliding the way into the stratosphere."

After the height record was not accepted by the Allied occupying powers due to the war, Klöckner received official recognition from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) in the late 1990s . It was not until ten years after Klöckner's record flight that this height was exceeded by the American Bill Ivans during a similar scientific program in the Sierra Nevada .

Military trials in World War II

The ongoing war meant that Klöckner had to leave its actual test field, the civil glider test. Since he was already considered one of the best German test pilots at that time, he was used for many secret military tests, which in most cases were pioneering acts. In accordance with the increasingly difficult war conditions, these test procedures often did not run with the care necessary for the life of the pilots. In this environment, Klöckner's work colleagues included Karl Schieferstein, Wolfgang Späte, Ubo Jansen and Hanna Reitsch. In parallel to his record gliding flights, he completed the first tug tests in Augsburg with the still motorless rocket aircraft ME 163 and obtained the still outstanding C2 permit in Völkenrode.

His test fields included:

• Coupling tests in the air : The designer Dipl.-Ing. Felix Kracht came up with the idea of ​​coupling aircraft together during flight. Klöckner tested this mechanism with a Focke-Wulf Fw 58 "Weihe", which was coupled to a Junkers Ju 52 towing machine. In the course of this development, coupled air refueling was also developed by DFS. Docking and air refueling played a central role in military aviation during the Cold War .
• Checking of brake rockets and towed vehicles : Among other things, Klöckner tested the SG 5041 towing device as an additional tank for the newly developed Arado Ar 234 jet bomber with radio direction finder, which he also flew. From Berlin-Tempelhof to Neuburg an der Donau , Klöckner only needed 36 minutes on New Year's Day 1945.
• Different types of aircraft towing
• Testing of the DFS 331 high-capacity glider
• Mistletoe team Flights : Among other things, as leader of the carrier machine Do 217 K-3 for the height reconnaissance DFS 228 "narwhal"
• Testing of the self-sacrificed Me 328 aircraft: Klöckner tested the flight characteristics of the still motorless machine from August 1, 1942, in rope and mistletoe tow and notched in gliding flight, later also with Argus pipes. The project was discontinued in 1944 before it was ready for series production.
• Towing tests with the motorless adder as the pilot of the M1 and M3 test machines, late 1944 to early 1945
• First testing of the Argus engines under the wings of a DFS 230
• Testing of automatically opening parachutes
• Trials of the asymmetrical scout Blohm & Voss BV 141
• Testing of the ramjet for the stratospheric glider of space pioneer Dr. Eugene singer

Bundeswehr test pilot

As soon as flying became possible for German pilots after the war, Klöckner worked for industry. After founding the Bundeswehr, he worked again as a test pilot in Oberpfaffenhofen and Manching.

On March 11, 1999, SWR 3 broadcast a 30-minute documentary about the aircraft under the title Der Flieger-Erich - Aviation Pioneer from the Westerwald .

Even after his retirement, Erich Klöckner remained true to his passion. He died in 2003 in the senior citizens' home of the Bavarian Red Cross in Wolnzach, where he lived after the death of his wife.

literature

• Wolfgang Späte: Test Pilots: A Treatise on Test Flying from the Very Earliest Days to the Jet. Crecy Publishing, England 1999, ISBN 1-872836-20-8 .
• Horst Lommel: From altitude reconnaissance to space glider 1935–1945, DFS secret projects. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-613-02072-6 .
• Horst Lommel: The world's first manned rocket launch. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-613-01862-4 .
• Erich Klöckner's foray into the tropopause. In: Aerokurier magazine . Motor press, 1/1999.
• Georg Brütting; The most famous gliders. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-613-02296-6 .
• Horst Lommel: The Aviator Erich - an obituary for Erich Klöckner In: Aviation History magazine . No. 4, Lautec Software and Media, Siegen 2004.

Web links

• Site of the German Glider Museum on the Wasserkuppe
• The world record aircraft in the Deutsches Museum

swell

1. ↑ Horst Lommel: From the altitude reconnaissance to the space glider 1935–1945, DFS secret projects. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-613-02072-6 , p. 15.
2. ↑ Horst Lommel: From the altitude reconnaissance to the space glider 1935–1945, DFS secret projects. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-613-02072-6 , p. 16.
3. ↑ Horst Lommel: From the altitude reconnaissance to the space glider 1935–1945, DFS secret projects. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-613-02072-6 , p. 18.
4. ^ Karl-Heinz Eyermann : Air espionage. Volume 2, German Military Publishing House, Berlin 1963, p. 190.
5. ^ Walter Georgii: Research and sailing. Hauschild Verlag , Bremen 1997, ISBN 3-931785-54-8 .
6. ↑ Erich Klöckner's foray into the tropopause. In: Aerokurier magazine . Motor press, 1/1999.