Map scroller, updated 21.12.2024
Junkers A50
Marga von Etzdorf wrote in her book "Kiek in die Welt" on page 54 about problems with her map scroller (Kartenroller):
"The cross-country flight took me over the well-known route Hamburg—Berlin—Hamburg. It was in November, the weather was cold
and foggy. My fuel gauge was unreliable, and it already indicated in Wittenberge that the fuel was running low. That was unpleasant.
Nonetheless, I continued my flight. Continuing, albeit with a feeling as if I were sitting on a powder keg, that at any moment might
explode into the air. Any second, the engine could stall; if that happened, I would simply have to descend onto the first available field.
I carefully circled around all the forests, skirting around like a cat on hot bricks, passing all the cities and staying as much as possible
over fields and meadows. I was so glad that I knew the route, because, on top of everything, my map was stuck in the map scroller
(Kartenroller) and wouldn’t budge, not even a centimeter, no matter how much I tried. With my November-cold hands, I couldn’t
open the roller to pull out the map. Anyway, the flight in this way was very eventful, and I didn’t find myself, as I sometimes did in
the past, complaining about boredom and monotony.
I was satisfied when I finally managed to land in Tempelhof."
After some research, I found a description of the map roller in the L.Dv. 264, kindly provided by the Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMSBw). The image in the L.Dv. served as the basis for a reverse engineering of the map roller.
Here’s an advertisement for the map roller I found in the book “Die Luftfahrt-Navigation.”
Below are some screenshots from these two silent movies, showing a modified map roller used as a writing board. The navigator uses it to note Morse radio transmissions and display them to the pilot.