Josef Klees pushes open the large door of the hall in which a Cessna is waiting to fly over the Ahr Valley.
Where planes are parked that evening, there were bodies in the days after last summer's flood that had been recovered from the valley by helicopters.
Some of Josef Klees' club friends from the Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler air sports club saw them lying in the hall.
At that time, the people from the association supported the emergency services in the tower.
Tobias Schrors
political editor.
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Klees was not at the airport during this time because he himself had lost his home and had to take care of their two small children with his wife.
Now nothing more can be seen of the inferno, the gliders and motor planes are standing in the hall as if nothing had happened.
Klees pulls the Cessna out of the hall.
Only a few weeks ago he flew longer for the first time since the flood night.
"Before, the stress was on my neck too much," says the hobby pilot.
"Your head has to be free." Klees was 14 years old when he started flying.
This is a mass sport and, in association with volunteer flight instructors, it is also far cheaper than, for example, in commercial flight schools.
He got into the hobby when he moved with his family from Kirchheim in the Euskirchen district to Ahrweiler.
At that time, he made a sightseeing flight from the Koblenz airfield, and it was immediately clear to him: “I want to learn to fly.” So on a Sunday afternoon he drove up to the Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler airfield and received a registration form that his parents signed on the same day , raised 100 marks - and was able to pay for the first ten "starts" with it.
The flight lessons in the glider gave him honorary teachers.
Klees received the first of these on the day of registration.
At that time he could not enjoy the view of the Ahr Valley in a glider.
"Of course I didn't pay attention to that," he says while checking whether the plane has enough oil.
It's been 25 years since the first hour of flying, and Klees is so experienced that he can let his eyes wander over the vast country at the controls.
The propeller roars, the plane taxis to position.
"You can't do anything with 500 meters of road, but with a 500-meter runway the whole world opens up," Klees quotes a former chairman of his club as saying.
Then he takes off.
Fields and houses are slowly shrinking.
"There's Haribo down there," says Klees, pointing to a complex around a large gray box.
He was taken there with his wife and two children on July 15, the morning after the flood.
They had stayed the whole night on the first floor of the house not far from the Ahr.
From up here he can also see Karweiler, where the family lives in a transitional apartment.
"Christine and Detlef have created a very nice substitute home for us," says Klees about his hosts.
The Cessna approaches the Rhine, the river flows majestically through the green landscape.
"There's the Petersberg," says Klees, pointing to a summit of the Siebengebirge, on which the former guest house of the federal government can be seen from afar.
A boat sails from one bank to the other on the Rhine.
"That's the ferry in Linz, shortly after that the Ahr flows into the Rhine." From there, the Ahr looks particularly tiny from the air.
Compared to before the flood, the estuary is now much easier to see.
Greenery used to cover the river.
Klees heads west, up the course of the Ahr.
The great catastrophe becomes a detail in the landscape from a distance of 2700 feet.
A brown border lines the banks of the Ahr.
Upstream, the valley behind Ahrweiler becomes narrower and narrower, like a funnel.
Klees passes his home town and radios, he is now over Dernau, at an altitude of 2500 feet.
Below, the Ahr meanders through the narrow valley.
Traces of the devastation everywhere.
A train is standing around in the area without tracks, the Ahr draws a loop around a brown area.
"It's all a construction site," says Klees.
The tidal wave has torn a deep wound in the mountain on a slope, a whole piece is missing.
Through flying, Klees is practiced in observing the movement of clouds and the weather.
On some days he climbs with a glider, then he is completely dependent on the thermals.
"I see a cloud and I know I have to fly there because that's where the updraft is." But he didn't even begin to see what happened in July last year.
After half an hour, Klees prepares to land.
A little later he pulls the Cessna to its place in the hall.
Time to make his way home to the "alternative home" - his house is still a construction site due to open insurance issues.
July 14 marks the anniversary of the flood night.
The consequences are far from over.
In this series, the Klees family from Ahrweiler reports on how they coped with the flood disaster. In the end it was about the sense of time for the months after the flood, about the first spring, the improvised everyday life, the first Christmas, the christening of the little son and the beginning of the renovation of the house. In the FAZ podcast for Germany, the Klees family was introduced in this episode.