Richard Perlia

Richard Perlia (born April 6, 1905 in Aachen , † February 14, 2012 in Berlin) was a German test pilot , editor and photographer .

Adolescence and early flight experience until 1929

Richard Aloysius Hubert Perlia came as the seventh child of the cigar manufacturer Heinrich Perlia and his wife Emma nee. Schweitzer in Aachen to the world. He was born as the only child of his parents in the 20th century and was thus the baby of the Perlia family.

Even as a boy interested in aviation, he experienced the death of the then 19-year-old pilot Bruno Werntgen on a flight day on February 25, 1913 , which did not detract from his goal of becoming a pilot himself.

After school and the early death of his father, his strictly Catholic mother, who was now responsible for his upbringing, first sent him to the Maria Laach Abbey . A spiritual career was planned for the young Richard. A night of love brought him expulsion from the monastery and thus set the course for his later life as an aviator. He told his mother that as a pilot he was closer to God anyway than as a priest .

With his wish to become a pilot, he turned to Professor Theodore von Kármán , who taught in Aachen and held a chair for aerodynamics at the Technical University of Aachen . This helped him to get an apprenticeship at Hanns Klemms flying school in Böblingen. With flight instructor Hermann Weller he got his pilot's license on a Klemm L 20 . Weller recommended him aerobatic training, which he received from the Raab-Katzenstein company in Kassel. One of his flight instructors was Gerhard Fieseler . He also got to know Ernst Udet at this time. After flying advertisements for the Krone Circus , he finally became a works pilot at Raab-Katzenstein (Raka) in Kassel.

After the RaKa company went bankrupt, he moved to Berlin, where he sold his Hanomag commissary bread and used the proceeds to buy a sun lamp . With this, Perlia opened a "Sunlight Institute" in Berlin. After a mishap with a patient who reported him to the police, he bought a train ticket to Istanbul with the last of his money . Since his “Höhensonnen-Institut” was not registered with the finance, health or labor inspectorate, he thought this escape was the only way out. With no money in his pocket, he kept himself afloat in Istanbul as a porter, among other things. With the help of a German named Hans Tils living in Turkey, he got a job at the Ford factory in Istanbul, where he worked for some time. As a coal trimmer on a small freighter, he returned to Germany via Beirut in 1929 and was able to return to Klemm as a works pilot.

The time as an aerobatic pilot and flight instructor

With the aerial acrobat Fritz Schindler he appeared on various flight days. A feat that the two wanted to demonstrate was how Schindler switched from a Udet Flamingo to the Klemm L20, which was just above it . When the feat was due to be demonstrated, Perlia was not on time for lunch and had to watch the machines already in the air; this saved his life. When Schindler wanted to switch from the Flamingo to the Klemm, the flamingo flying below was relieved and at the same time the underpowered Klemm overloaded. The machines crashed into each other and crashed. There were no survivors, and so Perlia had jumped death "off the shovel" for the first time. Aviation was not harmless in those years, and so there were always overseas landings due to engine problems, often caused by the insulators of the spark plugs , which were made of soapstone .

The world economic crisis in 1930 ended his employment with Klemm in June 1930. He founded his own flying school in Aachen with his school friend Leo Lammertz after successfully passing the flight instructor examination with Captain Willi Kantstein. During this time he met the future "Führer" Adolf Hitler for the first time , who paid a visit to the Aachen-Merzbrück airfield with a Rohrbach Roland . At the time, Perlia took photos of Hitler, on which one could see that he did not particularly like flying and that he was literally “fed up”.

His further aviation career brought him his first unregistered night flight from Aachen Merzbrück to Cologne Butzweilerhof after a night of drinking. The night equipment of the Klemm consisted of three flashlights , whereby two with red or green foils over the reflector served as position lights and the third had to be used for the instrument lighting. The provisional position lights, which were attached to the edge arches of the wings with binding wire , fell off at the start, which Perlia and his fellow aviator who accompanied him could not, however, dissuade from their plan. Fortunately, the airfield commander in Cologne was Willi Kantstein, whom Perlia knew from his flight instructor exam. This prohibited flight cost him only a few laps in Cologne's old town .

Another piece of Hussar Perlias was the flight together with Lammertz, who was at the control stick, with a Klemm L25 , which was equipped with snow runners , on the Zugspitzplatt .

As a test pilot in National Socialism

After the NSDAP came to power , the days of the flight school were over. The influence of the National Socialists on aviation in Germany continued to grow. In order to continue working in aviation, Perlia only had two options: leave Germany or join the NSDAP, which he did in 1933. Through the mediation of Ernst Udet , he got a permanent job again in 1935 as a test pilot at the German Research Institute for Aviation in Berlin-Adlershof . During this activity, Perlia completed a loop with a Junkers Ju 52 / 3m , which was fully occupied with scientists and technical equipment, in order to really show the gentlemen "back there" "what's going on". In many other flights Perlia went to the performance limits of the aircraft he had flown. Extreme low-level flights , falls with subsequent interception and flat spins were part of his area of ​​responsibility. Perlia carried out these tests with aircraft, some of which were unsuitable for this, such as diving flights with a He 70 , a high-speed airliner operated by German Lufthansa . His distinctive flying talent and ability ensured that he survived these test flights unscathed.

Perlia spent due to an accusation of Wilhelm Richter some time in the Gestapo - prison in Berlin , Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse . No. 8. He was spying on behalf of the Soviet Union accused. Due to the fact that incriminating evidence was found in Richter's apartment, Perlia was released and Richter arrested.

On March 1, 1936, he switched to the Arado company , first in Brandenburg , later in Warnemünde , and in October 1937, at the same time as the pilot, Dipl.-Ing. Melitta Schiller , appointed flight captain. In mid-1939, on Udet's recommendation, he went to Anton Flettner in Diepensee , who was working on the development of the Flettner Fl 265 helicopter with intermeshing rotors . Perlia made the maiden flight with it , tested it and demonstrated the aircraft with the registration D-EFLV in Rechlin to Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring in July 1939 . Between January and November 1940 Perlia worked for the PATIN works in Berlin on the development of a bomb target device . The development and tests were carried out in the E -stelle Rechlin . Then he moved again, this time to Junkers in Dessau , where he worked until the end of the war .

post war period

After the war, Perlia was "too old" for the resurrected German aviation and so he primarily worked as a photographer and later as editor of the specialist magazine Flugwelt.

As a photographer, on June 17, 1953, during the popular uprising in the GDR under the pseudonym "xyz", he took many moving pictures that went around the world in the press. The photos made Perlia with a secret camera type Robot -Junior which was hidden in a book.

In 1955 Perlia went to the specialist magazine Flugwelt and worked there as an editor . During this time he wrote a critical report on the Air Force’s planned new fighter , the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter . As a result of this report, there were some disputes with the then Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss . Perlia was right back then when it came to claiming that the French Mirage III , which was also available, was not only safer but also cheaper. In the following years there were frequent accidents with the starfighter, which was nicknamed Widowmaker, Erdnagel or Flying Coffin. Despite the damning verdict of two Luftwaffe test pilots who tested the Starfighter at the manufacturer in the USA , Strauss held on to the controversial machine. Nevertheless, the collision with Strauss cost him his job with the Flugwelt.

From 1956 to 1957 Perlia worked as a technical assistant to Edgar Rößger at the Technical University of Berlin, doing research on jet propulsion in air traffic .

His work as a photographer then took him to Thailand , India and Nepal . In his books In a Secret Mission and Sometimes Above, Sometimes Below Perlia narrated his extraordinary life in an exciting and humorous style.

In 1986, at the advanced age of 81, Perlia applied for the German Spacelab Mission 12, which was to orbit the earth at the turn of the year 1990/91. That made him the oldest applicant. However, it was rejected despite being impressed by its vitality and dedication. Applicants with scientific training were given preference.

Perlia had been married for a second time since 1960.

Richard Perlia died in Berlin in 2012 at the old age of 106. His grave is in the Dahlem forest cemetery .

literature

• Richard Perlia: Sometimes up, sometimes down, the explosive life of test pilot Richard Perlia , Schiff & Flugzeug Verlagbuchhandlung , Horb 2002, ISBN 3-933304-03-2
• Richard Perlia: On a secret mission, memoirs of a test pilot under Hitler , Bechtermünz Verlag, 1999, ISBN 978-3-8289-5352-9

Films with Richard Perlia

• Richard Perlia in "Only Ju - Homage to a Lady", documentary, published in 2009 on behalf of DLBS, produced by HH-Film eK
• Richard Perlia in “With the Ju about Hamburg” (in the bonus material), published in 2010

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Perlia in the catalog of the German National Library
• Perlia on June 17, 1953
• Richard Perlia on his 100th birthday on April 6, 2005 ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file; 66 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Richard Perlia is dead. In: fliegermagazin.de. February 15, 2012, accessed February 20, 2012 . 
2. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 586.