Walter Meyer

The memoir chronicles and the aviation experiences of a businessman from Hamburg during the early 1930s. After unwittingly buying a stolen car that is confiscated by the police, he attends the thief's court trial in Berlin, sees sports airplanes at Staaken Airfield, and decides to buy an aircraft of his own. On the very day his daughter Margot is born in July 1930, he travels to Cologne to purchase a used Junkers A 50 Junior (registration D 1822) for 15,000 marks. He earns his pilot's license at Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel after several comical navigation blunders—including landing in Brunswick instead of Hanover and disabling his barographs with tools to hide a timing error. When his first airplane begins leaking oil heavily and earns the nickname Oil Sardine, he trades it in at the Junkers factory in Dessau for a brand-new Junkers Junior. This trade-in sparks a local newspaper scandal when Junkers sells his old D 1822 to an agent of Hitler, leading the author to sue the newspaper for defamation. He subsequently experiences a crankshaft failure and forced landing in his second plane (D-2240), competes in the 1935 Circuit of Germany Flight (Deutschlandflug) in his third plane (D-2586), and later suffers a near-fatal night crash with his sister in Magdeburg before being flown back to Hamburg on a stretcher aboard a Junkers Ju 52.

The most eventful flight described is the author's participation in the 1935 Circuit of Germany Flight (Deutschlandflug), which spans two dramatic stages:

In the first stage from Berlin to Stettin, Danzig, Königsberg, and back, the author is in the lead group until an overly hasty takeoff in Stettin causes his tail to lift too high, shattering his propeller against the ground.
After waiting two and a half hours for a replacement propeller to be flown in from Berlin, he takes off in last place with 100 penalty points, climbs to 1,600 meters through a thunderstorm after leaving Danzig, and carefully negotiates a rough off-field landing site where another competitor's plane already lies flipped on its wing, ultimately finishing the stage in 13th place.
In the second stage, flying with an assigned navigator (Orter), he sets a record pace through Bremen, Osnabrück, Münster, and Magdeburg before landing at a tiny, marshy emergency field at Mölzow near Brandenburg.
During takeoff from Mölzow through tall weeds and thistles, the aircraft strikes a hidden post and noses over vertically into a deep bog, submerging the strapped-in navigator completely underwater in the front cockpit.
After the author pulls his coughing navigator up to the rear cockpit, the two men are stranded in the swamp until police officers throw them a rope, which the navigator ties to the vertical tail skid so the plane can be hauled out backward.
Moments later, another competing pilot clips a wing upon landing and crashes right beside them, tearing his engine out of its mounts, and the three grounded aviators pass the time playing Skat next to the wreckage until a car picks them up.