On the runway is a new airplane type. It is the pride of all the people involved. Among them Ludwig Bartuschek. The film tells the story of this smart, unflinching man, leading into the past with several flashbacks. The end of the Weimar Republic: director general Dehringer offers Ludwig vocational training as an aircraft designer at the Sperber Factory. The job would offer him protection from the fascists. In return, Dehringer wants Bartuschek to give up his political attitude as a communist. But Bartuschek decides to go into hiding and bids farewell to his wife and child. He does not know yet that they will not see each other for over a decade. His wife is arrested, his son Henne finds shelter in the family of a colleague. In 1944 Ludwig appears in the surroundings of the Sperber Factory, disguised as a French foreign worker. His task is to organize local resistance. But his plan is revealed and Ludwig is taken to a concentration camp. In 1945 father and son come face to face again: one is still wearing the striped smock of the concentration camp, the other one is adorned with the swastika armband of a national socialist anti aircraft helper. Both decide to rebuild the factory. With “People with Wings” Konrad Wolf continues the story of the radio operator Ludwig Bratuschek from the film “The Sailor’s Song” (director: Kurt Maetzig). But what started with so much enthusiasm in the film comes to a lapidary end in reality one year later: The Comecon decided to abandon the aircraft industry of the GRD. Soon afterwards, the film was withdrawn.
