Rita Maiburg

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Rita Maiburg (born June 23, 1952 in Bonn ; † September 9, 1977 in Greven ) was a German pilot and the first female scheduled flight captain in the world.

Life

Rita Maiburg was the oldest of four children of the architect couple Alois and Gertrud Maiburg. She attended elementary school in Bonn and completed her schooling in 1968 at the girls' high school in Hersel near Bonn with a secondary school leaving certificate. She began her flight training in 1967 in the glider club Vorgebirge e. V. In 1969 she acquired a private pilot's license at the Aviation School in North Rhine-Westphalia in Bonn-Hangelar. This was followed by training in the non-technical operations service of the Federal Air Traffic Control Agency in Bonn.

In the early 1970s she worked as a copilot and office specialist in Munich. In 1972 she lost this position. For two years she could not find employment and finally, together with her lawyer and with the financial support of a journalist, she filed a lawsuit against the Federal Republic of Germany and Lufthansa , because the latter refused to employ women as pilots or even to train them at that time. Although Maiburg lost the trial, it became so well known that a regional airline, DLT , took the “risk” and hired her as a pilot.

In 1976 she was promoted to the world's first and (at that time) only female flight captain in regular service. Besides her there were only two other female flight captains: Bulgarian Marija Atanassowa (cargo plane) and British woman Yvonne Sintes (charter plane). Maiburg's employer, the DLT, did not tell the passengers that a woman was at the control stick. The announcement at takeoff was: "On behalf of the flight captain Maiburg, I greet you ..." and was made by the stewardess.

On the evening of September 2, 1977, on the way to the airport, Rita Maiburg collided head-on with a milk tanker at the wheel of her car. A week later, at the age of 25, she died of a pulmonary embolism.

In 2009, a street in a residential area in Berlin-Bohnsdorf, which was just being built, was named Rita-Maiburg-Straße by resolution of the Treptow-Köpenick District Council . In Cologne, on the site of the former Butzweilerhof airfield, there is a Rita-Maiburg-Straße. There is also a Rita-Maiburg-Straße in Filderstadt (Stuttgart Airport) and in the Gateway Gardens district of Frankfurt airport .

literature

  • Ernst Probst : queens of the skies. Biographies of famous female pilots. Verlag Ernst Probst, Mainz-Kostheim 2002, ISBN 3-935718-76-4 .
  • Ernst Probst: Queens of the skies from A to Z: Biographies of famous female pilots, balloonists, airmen, parachutists and astronauts , Grin, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-640-65800-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Decision of BVV Treptow-Köpenick on the dedication of road land and road naming in the development plan area XV-70a ( Memento of May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 575 kB), accessed on June 13, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Maiburg, Rita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pilot, first female scheduled flight captain in the world
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 1977
Place of death Greven