Walter Mittelholzer was a Swiss pilot, photographer, and travel writer who believed aviation could change the world. He grew up in Switzerland during the First World War, watching from a neutral country as aircraft reshaped modern warfare. What he saw didn’t just impress him — it gave him a clear vision. People, he understood, would one day travel freely and efficiently across the globe by air. He set out to make that future real, and to document it along the way.
Mittelholzer learned to fly in 1917 and became a military pilot in 1918. After the war, he teamed up with Alfred Comte, a fellow aviation pioneer, to form a combined photography and aviation company. Together they offered passenger flights to various destinations across Europe and beyond, and Mittelholzer photographed the terrain below during every journey. These were among the very first aerial photographs ever taken.
In 1920, Comte and Mittelholzer merged their operation with the Zürich-based airline Ad Astra Aero. That new company would eventually grow into Swiss Air. But Mittelholzer was less interested in building an airline than in exploring the world from above. Throughout the 1920s, he racked up a series of aviation firsts that no other pilot had achieved. He was the first to fly over Mount Kilimanjaro, the first to fly over Mount Etna, and the first to fly the length of Africa from north to south — a journey that took 77 days.
He also became the first pilot to document his flights through both aerial photography and film. Every major route he flew produced a visual record of the land below. Cities, coastlines, mountain ranges, and river valleys all appeared in sharp detail — perspectives that people on the ground had never seen before.
His routes took him across the Iberian Peninsula, giving him a bird’s-eye view of Spain’s cities and coastline. Madrid sprawled across the dry Castilian plateau, its streets and plazas visible from high above.
Further south, the landscape shifted dramatically. Seville and Cádiz revealed their distinct layouts from altitude, while the coastline near Cape Trafalgar — a stretch of water famous from naval history — curved along the edge of the continent.
Smaller towns like Arcos and Brenes, and the port of Algeciras near Gibraltar, came into frame as Mittelholzer pressed further south toward the African continent.
The Ebro Valley near Osera showed the scale of Spain’s interior, while the French coast offered different terrain as he passed through southern Europe on his longer expeditions.
Crossing into North Africa, his camera captured Morocco and Algiers — cities that most Europeans had never seen from any angle, let alone from thousands of feet in the air.
Mittelholzer had an even larger ambition: to systematically document the entire world from the air, decades before satellite imagery or digital mapping existed. He never completed that goal. He died in a climbing accident in Austria before he could see it through. In his lifetime, he produced over 18,500 photographs. All of them are now housed at ETH Library’s image archive in Zürich, Switzerland. For the first time in history, ordinary people could look at those images and see the land they lived on from above.
