Peter Gluckman 'Ein Jedermann'

Sixteen years after Charles Lindbergh — and a decade after aviators like Amelia Earhart were celebrated around the world — Peter Gluckmann set out across the Atlantic to visit his family in England and return to Berlin, the city of his childhood.

Gluckmann was a Jedermann — an ordinary person — with no sponsorship or institutional backing. Holding only a private pilot’s licence, he made a few simple modifications to his used Luscombe 8F and, in the summer of 1953, flew his tiny two-seat aircraft across North America, the North Atlantic, and Europe — and back.

He did so in an era before accurate weather forecasting, navigating by dead reckoning — using only a compass, maps, and a stopwatch — aided, at times, by the primitive and often unreliable radio beacons of the day.

A Witness To History

Making History

Peter Gluckmann’s flight across the Atlantic bridged far more than open water.

His 1953 journey was a personal odyssey that bore witness to the destruction of the Second World War — Berlin was still a city of ruins — and to the new geopolitical fault lines of the Cold War. The city was surrounded by the Red Army.

Gluckmann had fled Berlin in 1939 as a 12-year-old Jewish refugee. Fourteen years later, he returned as a private pilot, landing at Berlin-Tempelhof — one of the most storied airfields in the world.

First a cradle of aviation innovation, then a showpiece of the Nazi regime, and later the epicentre of the Berlin Airlift, Tempelhof was bustling when Gluckmann arrived. Just weeks earlier, East Germany had sealed the inner-German border, and the June 17 uprising — brutally crushed by Soviet tanks — had driven tens of thousands to flee through West Berlin. In the summer of 1953, Tempelhof airport was the only safe escape route to West Germany for East German refugees.

Amid this turmoil, Gluckmann’s modest Luscombe 8F was the first — and likely the only, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — privately registered civilian “sport” aircraft to land in Berlin after the war.

The Russians were also on his mind as he flew the narrow, restricted air corridors to and from the divided city, his camera ready in case he encountered Soviet aircraft. When he was overdue on the return leg, U.S. authorities — fearing he might have been intercepted or detained — had already launched a search operation before he eventually landed safely in Frankfurt.

For Gluckmann, “Berlin was not a nice place to see.” He stayed only twenty hours. Perhaps the devastation of the city — or the echoes of his own past — made his homecoming too heavy to bear.