"Buby"

Every morning for three years youthful Pilot Johannes ("Buby") Nehring of the Meteorological Institute at Darmstadt, took an observer aboard his Junkers plane and climbed 16,000 ft. to gather weather data for the German Air Ministry. Flying without instruments, he would sometimes lose his bearings, tumble out of a cloud, climb back in again.

Last week, in Nehring's daily ascension, a wing wobbled at 10,000 ft., pitched the plane about. The observer's parachute saved him. But Nehring, banged senseless against the side of the cockpit, gyrated to his death.

German airmen mourned "Buby" Nehring. He was a baby-faced lad when, at the age of 20, he began hanging around their glider camp at Wasserkuppe in the Rhoen mountains. He was still scarcely a man when he pioneered much of the path to Germany's present pinnacle in the art of gliding. Onetime holder of the 45-mi. distance record,* "Buby's" crowning feat was a glider flight from Wasserkuppe over hills and gorges to a rock castle seven miles distant, and a return to his starting point against severe conditions.

It was "Buby" who discovered that cumulus clouds, shunned by airmen, invariably mark the currents essential to metorless flight. At Darmstadt he was flying a baby motored plane the engine of which would become overheated and quit regularly every twelve minutes. One such lapse occurred beneath a cumulus cloud mass. Astonished, "Buby" felt his little craft borne not down but steadily higher.

*Present record of 92 miles was made by Robert Kronfeld last year at Wasserkuppe, partly as a result of Nehring's researches.

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