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Richard Perlia

As a test and company pilot, Richard Perlia was flying many times in secret mission. He was a flight captain in a time when learning was successful only by trial and error with error being the euphemistic paraphrase for the inevitable sentence of death for the test pilot. It was already in 1927 that Udet discovered Perlia’s extraordinary aeronautical talent. Perlia was training as a student pilot with the company aerobatic champion Fieseler for "extended aerobatics". Udet kept an eye on Perlia and regularly assigned jobs to him that promised to be especially unusual and difficult. In the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (DVL, German Experimental Institute for Aviation) in Berlin-Adlershof, Perlia had to carry out flat spins on 52 occasions, although a flat spin was equivalent to a fatal crash. The vertical fall from high altitude promised to produce a military advantage. Therefore, Perlia had to test the He-70 (commercial aircraft of the Lufthansa) and the Ju-88 in vertical flight, although these machines were not designed for such manoeuvres. At the Lufterprobungsstelle (flight test centre) at Rechlin he had to undertake demonstration flights with the Flettner helicopter Fl-265 that was unable to fly with autorotation, just above Hitler and his staff. A suicide squad. Only a minor engine failure would have meant certain death to Perlia – and possibly a stroke of luck to the world. He returned from many a flight, when a return seemed impossible.
By courtesy of Rolf Dörpinghaus, aviation journalist