	Ready for take off at the launch of the East Asia expedition on 4 July 1926 at Berlin-Tempelhof airport. The crew of the first flight: Expedition leader Dr. Knaus, Flight Captain Schnäbele and Aircraft Mechanic Steidel.

Pilots

From Berlin to Peking

Establishing a flight connection to the Far East was one of the primary strategic objectives of Lufthansa as an emergent airline. In the year of its founding in 1926, the fledgling airline began exploring the air route from Berlin to Peking with two Junkers G 4 planes. Preparations for the pioneering flight were meticulous: The stopovers on the 10,000-kilometre route were planned in detail, and spare engines, parts and tools were despatched to Siberia and China.

East Asia expedition 1926:
Reception in Peking

One of the most difficult and time-consuming enterprises was getting oil and petrol supplies to remote airfields. Finally, however, Lufthansa flights D 901 and D 903 took off from Berlin-Tempelhof on 4 July 1926. The first stage, via Königsberg and Smolensk, ended in Moscow. On 25 July, the two aircraft flew on to Kazan, capital of the Tatar Republic. The next leg took the aircraft over the Urals to Kurgan and from there to Omsk, Barabinsk and Novsibirsk. Onward they flew to Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, where the crews had a few days rest before setting out for Chita, Manchuria, Charbin and Mukden (Shenyang) on 13 August – the expedition finally reached Peking on 30 August.

Pioneering as that achievement was, it was not Lufthansa’s intent to compete with other airlines in establishing new route records. Its objective was rather to implement reliable, regular air links for future trans-Siberian air traffic and create the necessary infrastructure basis for new commercial relations and business opportiunities in the Far East.

Expressed in figures:

The flight between Berlin and Peking took 72 hours. A journey by rail at the time took 15 days and by steamer 42 days. But the start of regular flights in 1926 had to be deferred: China was still divided by civil war and hostilities in Manchuria ruled out any possibility of overflights.

As Wolfgang von Gronau, one of Lufthansa’s outstanding pioneers observed: “I’m not engaging in a sporting contest, my objective is to explore a route for regular air traffic of the future.” In a word, the flight was spawned by farsighted traffic planning, since the establishment of an air link between Europe and Asia was a major commercial proposition. And given the necessary infrastructure on the ground, Lufthansa could prove the feasibility of laying on scheduled flight operations.