roland

Great pic and very cool series !

The L.F.G.-Roland D.XVI here in its first version powered by a 160 hp Siemens Sh.II rotary engine driving a four-bladed propeller. A second sample of the L.F.G.-Roland D.XVI was fitted with a Goebel III rotary of 170 hp driving a two-bladed propeller. Sometimes the different machines are identified as D.XVI/1 (with the Siemens engine) and D.XVI/2 (with the Goebel engine). But these identities may have been dreamt up years after the event. A picture of the D.XVI with the Goebel engine can be found here

Just visible on the picture behind the end of the fuselage is a two-wheel luggage car. The wheels are visible at the underside and the two bars are visible above the fuselage. This car was used to bring in the prescribed loads for world record flights done on 4 February 1927. The place is the Berlin-Staaken flying field. Behind the Rohrbach Roland is a large building which is a Zeppelin hangar used during WW1. The text at the side of the fuselage reads Rohrbach Roland. More about the world record flights in in Flight 17 February 1927 www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1927/1927%20-%200103... where an almost equivalent picture of this Roland (civil registration D 999) is printed. The name of the pilot is misspelled, it was Hermann Steindorff.

Correct spelling Molineux. And a bit of a character too, to put it mildly... The New York Times, 7 Sept 1914: ROLAND B. MOLINEUX TERRORIZES VILLAGE; Races Through Babylon, Half Clad, Assaulting Men and Women He Meets. INQUIRY INTO HIS SANITY Patient at Mac Levy's Farm ;- Second Nervous Breakdown Since His Play Was Put On. Roland B. Molineux, who was tried twice for the murder of Mrs. Katherine L. Adams in 1899, and who spent twenty months in the death house at Sing Sing before he was acquitted in 1902, caused a stir in Babylon, L.I., early yesterday morning by escaping from a sanitarium, where he was undergoing treatment for a nervous breakdown, and running through the streets of the village, knocking down every one who crossed his path. No biography on Wikipedia, but this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Molineux

Molineux died in 1917, at age 51, as a patient at the New York State Hospital for the Insane in Kings Park, Long Island.

is he the one who gave churchill a piece of his skin