| Walter Mittelholzer | |
| Birth Name: | Walter Mittelholzer |
| Birth Date: | 1894 4, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | St. Gallen, Switzerland |
| Death Place: | Hochschwab, Styria, Austria |
| Nationality: | Swiss |
Walter Mittelholzer (2 April 1894 – 9 May 1937) was a Swiss aviation pioneer. He was active as a pilot, photographer, travel writer, as well as of the first aviation entrepreneurs.
Mittelholzer was born on 2 April 1894 in St. Gallen, the son of a baker, earned his private pilot's license in 1917. In 1918 he completed his instruction as a military pilot.
On 5 November 1919 he co-founded an air-photo and passenger flight business, Comte, Mittelholzer, and Co. In 1920 this firm merged with the financially stronger Latin: [[Ad Astra Aero]]|italic=no. Mittelholzer was the director and head pilot of Latin: Ad Astra Aero|italic=no, which later became Swissair.
He made the first north–south flight across Africa. It took him 77 days. Mittelholzer started in Zürich on 7 December 1926, flying via Alexandria and landing in Cape Town on 21 February 1927. Earlier, he had been the first to do serious aerial reconnaissance of Spitsbergen, in a Junkers monoplane, in 1923.[1] On 8 January 1930 he became the first person to fly over Mount Kilimanjaro; he planned to fly over Mount Everest later in 1930.[2] [3] In 1931, Mittelholzer was appointed technical director of the new airline called Swissair, formed from the merger of Latin: Ad Astra Aero|italic=no and Balair.[4] Throughout his life he published many books of aerial photographs and marketed his expeditions through films and the media as well.[5] He died in 1937 in a climbing accident on an expedition in the Hochschwab massif in southwest face of Stangenwand in Styria, Austria.[6]
Among other Swiss air pioneers, he is commemorated in a Swiss postage stamp issued in January 1977. His legacy of some 18,500 photographs is kept at ETH Library's image archive in Zürich, Switzerland.