19 November 1986 · Aircraft and balloons
Volkmar Kienöl and Klaus Kuschmierz try to glide to the Springer building
Two young men spent a night on the roof of a Leipziger Straße tower block beside two home-made hang gliders, planning to land in front of the Axel Springer building in West Berlin just 200 metres away. They came down short of the Wall.
This is a reported escape. It appears in a reputable publication, but its key details could not be checked against a second source. See the note below.
On 19 November 1986 two young men, Volkmar Kienöl and his friend Klaus Kuschmierz, were crouching on the roof of a 75-metre, 25-storey high-rise in the Leipziger Straße in Berlin-Mitte. They had spent the night up there without the residents noticing, waiting and chain-smoking beside two hang gliders they had built themselves.
Their landing place was only about 200 metres away but in another world: they meant to glide down in front of the Axel Springer building in West Berlin, just across the border strip. They knew they had to go before it became light and busy on the ground below.
The flight failed. According to the Tagesspiegel, which retold the story in 2019, the two came down just short of the Wall, in the middle of Berlin. The paper headlined it as the 'good ending of a failed escape through the air'.
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