German aviation pioneer, who flew planes with his older brother Karl Gustav Vollmöller. Hans Robert Vollmöller’s promising career was cut short when he died in a plane crash at age 28.
He was a son of industrialist Robert Vollmöller and social reformer Emilie Vollmöller.
At the age of 15, he started building the first German motorized aircraft in Vaihingen together with his older brother Karl, who was also the designer of the four “Vollmöller” aircraft.
In 1905 when he was 16 he learned to fly. Hans Robert Vollmöller had an unusual talent for flight; two years later he contested the first flying competitions in Germany and other European countries and won numerous trophies. In the summer of 1910, the Vollmöller brothers made their first long-haul flight of around 150 km fron Bad Cannstatt to Lake Constance. After an accident in the autumn of 1910, in which a spectator died, the Vollmöller brothers stopped building their own aircraft.
In 1911, Hans Robert Vollmöller went to Berlin to work as a designer and test pilot for Edmund Rumpler. On 15 May 1911 he earned his pilot licence.
Vollmöller was drafted at the beginning of the war in 1914 and worked in the design team of Hellmuth Hirth and Bosch director Gustav Klein. With the further participation of Graf Zeppelin, it became “Versuchsbau GmbH Gotha-Ost” (VGO) in 1914. The designers were Alexander Baumann, as well as the engineers Hermann and Scholler, who had set themselves the goal of developing a “giant airplane.”
As chief pilot, Hans Robert Vollmöller led a test flight of the first of the giant aircraft, the VGO I, on 10 March 1917 in Berlin. It was a cold and windy day. The plane took off around 2 PM and on its return hit a corner gate of the hall and crashed, instantly killing Vollmöller.

Link to Wikipedia biography (German)