The Man on the Nose

At twenty past twelve on 21 February 1927, a single-engined Dornier Merkur settled onto the water off Cape Town. It had left Zurich seventy-seven days earlier. In the photograph taken shortly afterwards — plate 197 of the book the crew published that same year — the machine sits low in a light swell, the upper wing throwing a hard shadow across the hull, the mass of Table Mountain grey behind it. A launch has already come alongside, crowded with men in hats. And on the nose of the aeroplane, one hand steadying himself against a propeller blade, stands a young man in shorts.

That man was my grandfather, Oskar Schmid.

The flight had begun on 7 December 1926 at Zurich, with four men aboard: Walter Mittelholzer, then director and chief pilot of Ad Astra Aero; the writer René Gouzy, who had proposed the journey in the first place; the geologist Arnold Heim; and Hans Hartmann, mechanic and second pilot. The aircraft carried the registration CH-171 and the name «Switzerland». It stood on floats, which is the whole explanation of the route it took.

A continent without aerodromes is crossed by a seaplane in the way a man without a map crosses a moor: by what will bear him. From Zurich the Merkur went to Pisa, Naples, Athens and Alexandria, then turned inland and followed the Nile upstream towards its sources, on to the great lakes — Albert, Victoria, Tanganyika — and from Mozambique down the East African coast to the Cape. The line on the map looks like an act of will. It was in fact an act of hydrology: water long enough, calm enough and deep enough to take a landing.

It was also, from the first day, a photographic undertaking. The aeroplane carried Tropen-Nettel and Leica cameras, an automatic aerial camera built for survey work, and a darkroom small enough to be called a cupboard, so that film could be developed in the air. Mittelholzer flew, photographed and filmed; what came back to Switzerland was not a report but a spectacle. The film drew thousands a day. The book went through edition after edition. His photographic archive, some 18,500 images, is at the ETH Library in Zurich to this day, and it is one of the richest visual records of the period anywhere in Europe.

Richness, though, is not the same as innocence. The 200-odd photographs in «Afrikaflug» show Africans dancing, holding spears, selling bananas — almost never named, almost never given a context of their own. The cultural historian Sonja Malzner has called this an indirect taking of possession: Switzerland had no colonies, but it had a camera, and the camera did much of the same work. Mittelholzer wrote of crowds meeting him with childlike awe. The aeroplane was modern, the continent beneath it was not; that was the story, and it sold. A reader in 2026 cannot look at plate 197 without also seeing the frame around it.

What happened afterwards has the flatness of all aviation history. The «Switzerland» was taken apart in Cape Town and shipped home, fitted with wheels, put to work on European routes, and broken up at Dübendorf in 1931 — the same year Ad Astra Aero merged with Balair to form Swissair, with Mittelholzer as technical director. He flew over Kilimanjaro in 1930, over Lake Chad, over Abyssinia. He died in 1937, at forty-three, in a climbing accident in the Hochschwab in Austria. The aeroplane outlived the expedition by four years; the pilot outlived it by ten.

My grandfather was not part of the crew, and the book does not mention his name. He was already there. He was Swiss, he lived in South Africa, and he worked for Bally, the shoe manufacturer of Schönenwerd in the canton of Solothurn — a firm that had been exporting since 1857 and had opened offices in Montevideo in 1870, Paris in 1879 and London in 1881, the last of these the door to the markets of the British Empire, of which the Cape was one.

This is the part of the picture that interests me most. The heroic version of the Africa flight is about four men in a machine. The duller and truer version is that they came down in a bay where a Swiss commercial network had been in place for decades: agents, bookkeepers, warehouse managers, men who knew the harbour master and could find fuel, a mechanic and a bed. A country with no colonies had something else instead — employees. The man on the nose of the aeroplane is not an explorer. He is one of the people who were already on the ground when the explorers arrived, and who arranged the welcome.

He climbed up there, I assume, because the aircraft was the most extraordinary thing that had ever come into that bay and because he was young. Somebody with a camera saw him do it. The photographer is unknown — most likely one of the crew, standing on a float or in the launch. It is not a posed picture. It is the kind of picture that gets taken in the twenty minutes after something arrives.

The photograph now runs right around a porcelain mug: the aeroplane at full length, the mountain behind it, the water underneath, and a man on the nose holding onto a propeller. It is a strange place for a family document to end up. But then this photograph was never only a family document. It belonged first to a book that a whole country read, and it is worth having both things in front of you at once — the achievement and the gaze — while the coffee cools.

Sources: ETH Library / ETHeritage on the Africa flight of 1926/27; Swiss National Museum blog on Walter Mittelholzer; SRF on Mittelholzer’s photographs and the colonial gaze; Historical Dictionary of Switzerland on Bally; Walter Mittelholzer, René Gouzy and Arnold Heim, «Afrikaflug», Orell Füssli, Zurich 1927.