Period art and design often features items that are regarded askance now. Today’s poster apparently suggests the use of an aircraft to stampede some of Africa’s more famous animals, with lions, elephants and giraffes running at speed from a swooping Fokker F.VII. I’m sure the real story was a lot less hooligan like.

Entitled ‘Mittelholzer’s Afrikaflug 1930’ (‘Mittelholzer’s 1930 Africa Flight’) it is a promotional poster for relatively unknown (today in the Anglosphere) Swiss pioneer ‘air explorer’. (Online auction version of the poster here.) From a new book on is work, the publishers introduce him here:

“Walter Mittelholzer (1894–1937) is famous as a pilot, a cofounder of Swissair and for his aerial photographs of the Swiss Alps. His flying expeditions abroad, which proved Mittelholzer also to be a shrewd media entrepreneur, are less well-known, however. He used every channel to market the images of his travels: books, films and in the press. Mittelholzer’s breakthrough came with his Africa flight from Zurich to Cape Town on the seaplane Switzerland in 1926/27.”

A good Swiss biography here, and there’s more on his English Wiki page, including photos of several of the aircraft he used here. and a bibliography of his extensive publications here. A near short film of around three minutes shows highlights from his endeavours here.

Two evocative period images from the website of the ‘Walter Mittelholzer Revisited’ book here.

James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer.