Bidspirit auction | Great War ace Gerhard Fiesler

Great War ace Gerhard Fiesler signed RARE Rossbach flown RAF cover No. 14 of 26. Kings Cups Air Race RAF cover 1972, flown in the race. Gerhard Fieseler (15 April 1896 - 1 September 1987) was a German World War I flying ace, aerobatics champion, and aircraft designer and manufacturer. Fieseler joined the Air Service of the Imperial German Army in 1915. A crash during training hospitalized him until February 1916, but he had become an observation pilot by October 1916, flying first with Feldflieger Abteilung 243, then with Feldflieger Abteilung 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 Jagdstaffel 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 while working at Raab-Katzenstein, he designed his own stunt plane, the Fieseler F1 (also known as the Raab-Katzenstein RK-26 Tigerschwalbe), which was offered and sold to a Swedish company called AB Svenska Järnvägverkstäderna (ASJ), which built 25 of the type for Swedish Air Force in the beginning of the 1930s. Single Vendor autograph collection. Good condition. All autographs come with a Certificate of Authenticity. We combine postage on multiple winning lots and can ship worldwide. UK postage from £5.99, EU from £7.99, Rest of World from £9.99