A Girl Named Lufthansa

It is July 23, 1965. We are aboard a Lufthansa Boeing 707 en route from ​Frankfurt to ​New York. Helga Herzog, eight months pregnant, is looking forward to embracing her husband at JFK Airport in a few hours. She emigrated with him to Connecticut a year ago and had been visiting her parents in Pforzheim one last time before the birth of her first child.   

But then Helga Herzog becomes restless. She feels her labor contractions starting and turns to the flight attendants. She hadn’t expected this – unaware that flying in the eighth month is actually no longer recommended, she had boarded the flight.   

Captain Alwin Meyer quickly had the ​first-class cabin converted into a delivery room – just in time before little Barbara was born at 6:47 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time between Newfoundland and Labrador at an altitude of 12,000 meters (39,370 feet).    

“It was easy,” flight attendant Ria Bermbach recalled years later in a newspaper article about the birth. Together with American nurse Helene Rerat, who happened to be on board, she had helped deliver the baby – assisted by a doctor who gave instructions via radio from a parallel flight traveling from Munich to the US.  

The birth took 30 minutes, and afterward, Captain Alwin treated the passengers to a glass of champagne. When the new father embraced his wife and daughter at JFK Airport shortly thereafter, he decided to give the baby the middle name “Lufthansa” out of gratitude.   

Barbara’s extraordinary birth above the clouds made headlines and remained in the public consciousness for years after. On her 18th birthday, Lufthansa invited her and her family to Cologne and presented the aspiring math student with a portable typewriter. But that wasn’t all: the entire flight crew that delivered her welcomed Barbara with a birthday cake – and she was reunited with her godfather, Captain Alwin Meyer.   

“It gave me the opportunity to get to know the country where my mother was born and raised,” Barbara Herzog later recalled about the event in a newspaper article. Nine years later, her unusual start in life was also a topic of conversation on the talk show “Capito” on HR3. Barbara Herzog appeared as a guest there with her mother Helga, who once again recounted the birth of her daughter at an altitude of 12,000 meters (39,370 feet): “I wasn’t afraid. It happened very quickly. But I was very embarrassed.”  

To this day, Barbara Herzog is repeatedly asked about her birthplace, which is listed in her passport only by coordinates. The same goes for her middle name, which caused quite a stir at her wedding in New York, for example.  

Since Barbara, ten more babies have been born on board Lufthansa aircraft. In 1981, for example, Karin Torres Bellido was born shortly before landing in Lima. In 1985, it was a boy who chose a Lufthansa DC-10 as his birthplace: Olatokunbo Olawale Afolabi from Nigeria. Because of him, the plane made a stopover in ​Mallorca on the flight from Lagos to Frankfurt. Most recently, in 2017, a Bulgarian woman gave birth to a boy on a flight from Bogotá to Frankfurt.  

Barbara isn’t the only one with the middle name “Lufthansa.” A man from Indonesia named his son Luthfie Lufthansa after a flight from his home country to Nuremberg because he was so satisfied with the flight.   

Births on airplanes are very rare. Pregnant women are only permitted to fly with Lufthansa until the end of the 36th week of pregnancy. Up to that point, flying is considered safe.