Elisabeth Friske

Elisabeth Friske (1939/1940 – 31 May 1987) was a West German commercial airline pilot. She was the first female commercial airline pilot in West Germany, and one of the first women to fly commercially anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Commercial airlines also refused to pay for her to obtain an instrument rating, a requirement for piloting commercial airline flights, which was a standard practice at the time. Friske would eventually find work with startup West German airline Paninternational.

Crash of Paninternational Flight 112

Friske was the first officer on Paninternational Flight 112 on September 6, 1971. Due to a maintenance error, kerosene was sprayed into the water cooled engines of the BAC One-Eleven instead of water shortly after takeoff from Hamburg Airport, causing the engines to catch fire. Friske, Captain Reinhold Hüls, and third pilot Manfred Rhode made an emergency landing on the nearby Bundesautobahn 7. The pilots chose to land on the south-bound lane, opposite the flow of traffic, to avoid the heavy traffic on the north-bound lane out of Hamburg. During the landing, the plane struck a concrete overpass and its pillars, causing the plane to break apart.

In the aftermath of the accident, Paninternational ceased operations, and Friske struggled to find further commercial airline work. Despite the cause of the disaster being unrelated to pilot error, many early news reports pointed to a woman in the cockpit as a factor in the crash, labeling her the "Catastrophe Woman in the Cockpit," an image that followed her the rest of her career.

Personal life

Friske was married to businessman and parachutist Gerd Friske, with whom she had a son, Erhard.