Gerhard Fieseler

Gerhard Fieseler (April 15, 1896 – September 1, 1987) was a German World War I flying ace, aerobatics champion, and aircraft designer and manufacturer.

Fieseler was born in Glesch. He joined the Air Service of the German Army in 1915. Despite a crash during training hospitalizing him until February 1916, he was assigned as an observation pilot by October 1916, flying first with FFA 243, then with FFA 41. In 1917, he qualified as a fighter pilot and was posted on 12 July to the Macedonian front, initially flying a Roland D.II with Jasta 25. Fieseler scored his first aerial victory on 20 August 1917. A serious illness removed him from active duty from 21 September until 5 November 1917.

Fieseler would not score his second success until 30 January 1918. He was eventually credited with nineteen confirmed aerial victories, with three others unconfirmed. Commissioned in October 1918, he was the highest-scoring German ace on the Eastern Front to survive World War I. He was awarded the Golden Military Merit Cross and the Iron Cross, first and second class.

Following the war, he returned to printing, but yearned to return to flying. In 1926, he closed his print shop in Eschweiler and became a flight instructor with the Raab-Katzenstein aircraft company in Kassel and continued to hone his flying skills, becoming an accomplished stunt pilot. In 1927, he performed a particularly daring routine in Zürich and started to command increasingly high fees for appearances. In 1928, he designed his own stunt plane, the Fieseler F1, built by Raab-Katzenstein. He also designed Raab-Katzenstein RK-26 Tigerschwalbe aircraft in the end of the 1920s which was offered and sold to a Swedish company called AB Svenska Järnvägverkstaderna (ASJA), which built 25 of the type for Swedish Air Force in the beginning of the 1930s.

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