When I was a kid, I was a big dreamer! (I still am.) My two heroes were pilots. The first was Joseph Siffert, a Formula 1 driver; the second was a glacier pilot named Hermann Geiger. Both died in tragic circumstances. The first died during the Brands Hatch Grand Prix in England on October 24, 1971; the second died in Sion on August 26, 1966, in his Piper SuperCub during a training flight. It was a cruel fate that took my two idols from me five years apart... It is to the pilot that I would like to pay a small tribute...
In August 1966, I had to undergo surgery to correct my right leg. It was causing me problems as a result of polio I had contracted nine years earlier. I have two major memories from that hospital stay: the first is my nurse, named Sabine, a very beautiful young blonde girl with whom I was very much in love (as much as a twelve-year-old boy can be at that age...). The second is the radio announcement of the accident involving the Valais glacier pilot...
Some time ago, a friend of mine gave me a book that I devoured in one sitting: Geiger, pilote des glaciers (Geiger, Pilot of the Glaciers) (Editions Arthaud, 1955). From this book, which is now impossible to find, there is one thing above all else that captured my imagination as a child. Geiger talked about his observations as a child in the 1920s, spending hours analyzing the aerial movements of eagles and jackdaws, a type of mountain crow that lives in flocks. Here is what he had to say:
"The desire to glide through the air is as old as my memories. Lying quietly in the grass of the mountain pastures, I admired the majestic flight of jackdaws and eagles against the rock faces. With a whistle, I made these masters of the air disappear so that I could watch them, again and again, as they landed gently on the reefs overlooking the bottomless abysses. From then on, the idea of one day doing the same, or at least taking off a few inches from this heavy earth, never left me. I quickly realized that these graceful birds were guided by an immutable law of nature, for they always took off and landed against the wind."
Hermann Geiger was born on October 27, 1914, in Savièse, near Sion, in the Swiss canton of Valais. He grew up surrounded by his twelve brothers and sisters, experiencing the harsh life of the mountains from an early age. His interest in aviation developed very early on. When he had to leave to do his military service, he would have liked to join the air force, but his request was denied and he was asked to do his training with the infantry. It was tough going... In 1932, he met a young German aeronautical engineering student named Max Kaspar, who would later marry one of his sisters. Together, they set about building the first Valais glider, a “Hols der Teufel” (May the devil take it!), for which Max had the plans. It was Max who taught Geiger to fly, on a Zögling glider. Later, the Valais native moved to German-speaking Switzerland, specifically to Winterthur, not far from Zurich. There, needing to earn a good living, he became a policeman. And there, needing to make a life for himself, he met Hilda, who became his wife.
After the war, he returned to Valais, where he was hired as a police officer. In 1947, he became the caretaker of the civil airport in the city of Sion. The flying club was in its infancy, and Geiger quickly developed it. Aboard the Cessna 140, which he equipped with a system he developed himself, he began dropping supplies in the mountains to dams under construction. He also supplied fodder to flocks of sheep, chamois, and ibex that had been caught out and trapped by the cold and snow. Then he took delivery of the first Piper SuperCub equipped with skis. This aircraft would give him the means to carry out what he had been working on for so long...
On May 10, 1952, he made his first landing on the Kander glacier. Many people believe that he was the pioneer of this type of exercise, but this is not true! He himself claimed to remember that as early as 1932, he had learned that the great German test pilot Ernst Udet had successfully landed on a glacier in a small aircraft equipped with skis (without wheels). A hotelier from St. Moritz, Fredy Wissel, even beat him to it in Switzerland, making several landings on glaciers as early as 1951. Geiger did not invent anything new in this field. But he was the one who developed the technique for approaching, landing, and taking off on snowy slopes in high mountains.
From that day in May 1952 onwards, Geiger became a leading expert in the discipline, making a considerable number of landings on all the snow-covered slopes of the Swiss Alps. He trained many pilots in this exercise, notably the great Henri Giraud, the “slightly crazy Frenchman” who landed his Piper on Mont-Aiguille in Isère (1957), a rocky ridge rising vertically for over a thousand meters, and on the summit of Mont Blanc (1960). In Switzerland, these included Fernand Martignoni, another legendary figure in mountain flying, and Bruno Bagnoud, co-founder with Hermann and Fernand of the Air-Glaciers company, to name but the best known.
A specialist in mountain air rescue, Hermann Geiger is estimated to have rescued around 4,000 people during his short career. A tireless pilot, he single-handedly wrote some of the most remarkable chapters in the history of mountain aviation in Switzerland, becoming famous for his achievements around the world. Later, he learned to fly helicopters, which were becoming increasingly popular for this type of operation. Unfortunately, the most beautiful stories often have a tragic ending... On August 26, 1966, in the late afternoon, he was flying a SuperCub with a student at the Sion airfield. It was there that his aircraft collided with a glider he was unaware of, a glider whose pilot had also failed to see the small single-engine plane approaching him... Hermann Geiger had just died, doing his job, living his passion. He was not yet 52 years old.
I believe that many enthusiasts of the discipline have an aviator hero. Charles Lindbergh in the United States, Louis Blériot in France, Otto Lilienthal in Germany, Douglas Bader in England... (these are my personal choices). Switzerland is no exception to the rule. In all the surveys conducted on this subject, one name comes up unanimously: Hermann Geiger, glacier pilot, tireless and totally selfless rescuer, man of his word, as straight as an arrow, national hero, who fully realized his childhood dream. The hero of an entire aviation nation, as famous as the great William Tell himself...
To obtain a Swiss private pilot's license, all candidates must complete at least two mountain flights. This is a minimum and essential requirement. I remember perfectly those two extraordinary three-hour escapades in the heart of the Valais and Bernese Alps. My instructor gave me a taste, in complete safety, of those invisible and inscrutable wind gusts that have trapped more than one pilot. We flew over several glacier landing sites. At that precise moment, I relived Hermann Geiger's passion as described in “Pilote des glaciers” (Glacier Pilot)... I imagined the man at the controls of his machine, perfectly in control (unlike me) of assessing his altitude in relation to the snowy ground. I saw him approaching the slope, landing gently on this soft, clear surface, maintaining enough speed to make a U-turn without crashing at the top of the slope, then opening the throttle wide and pulling away from this soft blanket of immaculate snowflakes... I would have loved, at that precise moment, to be able to do the same...
Jackdaws, in the region where I live, are as common as flamingos! Otherwise, whenever I see a large bird gliding majestically downwards, its wings slightly shaken by the air currents, facing the wind, then, initiating a perfect turn, touching down with infinite lightness on the ground, I remember the words of that great pilot, artist, and master of snowy slopes:
...“With a whistle, I made these masters of the air disappear so that I could watch them, again and again, as they landed gently on the reefs overlooking bottomless abysses”...