Krimer hin! In english: Lets do it!
Whenever I think of Roland Bosch, this phrase immediately springs to mind. It was the phrase he regularly used to make possible the ideas we at aerokurier had come up with, but for which we needed the AEROs support to implement. And since Roland – just like me – always had far too much to do and communicate, he would occasionally skip pronouncing every letter of a word. "Wir kriegen das hin!" – far too long. "Krimer hin!" That’ll do.
A partner on equal terms
I met Roland Bosch in the run-up to AERO 2016, my first Aviation as editor-in-chief at aerokurier. I was completely new – and, to be honest, completely lost. I can no longer recall the situation in detail in which we conducted the interview, which then appeared in the April issue of AERO SPECIAL, but one thing I know for sure: it was not a situation in which an old hand set about explaining the world to a novice. That wasn’t Roland’s style. Roland was a communicator through and through. Listening, arguing, finding solutions. I liked that from the very start.
That first encounter marked the start of a collaboration lasting exactly ten years. A partnership that, owing to the nature of the AERO, was not permanent but took place intensively at specific intervals. A meeting in Stuttgart in the autumn to discuss the details of the media partnership for the coming year, a visit to Friedrichshafen to gather all the information on the current AERO for the interview in our SPECIAL issue – that was how it worked in practice.
A reunion among friends
My visits to Friedrichshafen, in particular, were always like a reunion among friends. In a down-to-earth manner, Roland would recount the problems he’d had to navigate this time round to make AERO a success, always knowing that the journalist opposite him could distinguish anecdotes from relevant information. Roland rarely asked for changes to the written word; he meant what he had said. Just sometimes a little less directly. And that was fine.
When it was announced that Roland would be taking his final leave from the trade fair business at the end of 2026, it was clear to us that we at aerokurier wanted to contribute something special. So the decision was made to thank him with an Innovation Award for his life’s work and to design a personalised aerokurier cover featuring photos from his time as an AERO organiser. His emotion at the award ceremony on Wednesday evening showed just how much we had struck a chord.
Roland and his certificate of honour fpr his lifetime achievement.
The farewell party organised by the team of the Messe Friedrichshafen and some long-standing colleagues on Friday evening during AERO also made clear the high regard in which Roland was held. Here, he was presented once again with his aerokurier cover, now framed. There was no way of foreseeing that the tongue-in-cheek headline "The Godfather Steps Down” would take on a tragic dimension just a few days later.
Special cover of aerokurier.
Hoped for, yet lost
As recently as early March, I met Roland for a final interview in Friedrichshafen, which was to focus on how the trade fair business and general aviation had changed over the many years he had been involved. I flew in on a motor glider, he picked me up from the airport, and we chatted about what he had planned to do after the end of his professional career. Above all, travel and time for his hobbies were to be the focus.
I received the news of his stroke last Saturday whilst on a business trip in Poland; a day later, I phoned Tobias Bretzel and asked him to pass on the best wishes for a speedy recovery from the entire aerokurier team to Roland and his family. Even at that point, the prognosis was not good.
The news of his death has nevertheless come as a shock to me and my colleagues. Each of us had met Roland, and I cannot recall anyone ever saying a bad word about him. Many obituaries are embellished, but in this case that is unnecessary.
Roland, we will miss you. We wish your loved ones much strength during this difficult time.
