Flying to freedom
This chapter had been written well before the fall of the Berlin wall and the famous opening of the border by Hungary, allowing thousands of East Germans to flee to the West. It is a nice quirk of history that the place where this story took place is just a few miles East of the place where the mass escape happened several years later.
That with a bit of ingenuity a small airplane can be used to beat an oppressive regime was amply demonstrated by the crew of the West-German Cessna that came visiting one Sunday afternoon.
Hungary had long been the gate to freedom for some of those poor souls whose fortune (or rather misfortune…) had left them east of the Iron Curtain after WW2. The trick had been fairly simple. Meet your West-German friends or relatives in Budapest, do a bit of surgery on their passports and off you go. The real nationals of the Federal Republic, who a few days later reported having “lost” their passports were promptly issued temporary papers and after one more goulash at beautiful Lake Balaton, they too would make their retreat. Of course, these earthbound souls did not have friends with an aircraft handy.
Not so the family which came in their Wartburg station wagon stopping to rest a few hundred metres off the highway connecting Budapest with the industrial town of Gyor, and further the Austrian border. It was of course pure coincidence that they should choose this particular road, stretching smack underneath the Budapest-Vienna airway… The same could be said of the peculiar way they parked their car, the bonnet pointing into the wind, as well as the brightly colored blanket spread on the edge of a pasture. To the policeman passing by on his bike the whole scene must have looked ordinary enough, just some tourists enjoying the quiet countryside.
All this time Budapest Center had been working a small Cessna, inbound from Vienna, destination Budapest, plodding along low and slow. Its blip vanished then reappeared, in harmony with the blind spots of the radar at such low altitudes. When they reported some minor problem with their engine, although again in one of the blind areas and thus not visible on the radar screen, Center wasn’t overly concerned. Radio contact had not been lost, so they must be still in the air, they reasoned and asked the pilot to report his intentions. Little they knew at that time what a broad smile this request must have drawn from the captain… Anyway, in a few seconds he came back announcing their wish to return to Vienna, where better repair facilities existed. Sure enough, in a few more seconds the blip reappeared, this time crawling back whence it had come.
As it turned out, our policeman had in the meantime reason to re-assess his evaluation of the scenery. The sight of the little plane landing into the wind on the green pasture next to the Wartburg, the family clambering inside and the machine climbing into the air once again at first left him with a gaping mouth, then realization struck. Jumping on his bike he pedaled furiously to the nearest police station, starting to explain what he had seen even before he had time to dismount from his bicycle.
Blessed be the obsolete Hungarian telephone system, by the time this information reached the Center, our little plane was happily winging its way over friendly Austria. Their “engine problem” must also have resolved itself, for, as a telephone query confirmed it, they did not land in Vienna but continued unimpeded to wherever home was awaiting them.
We never heard what happened finally to the car and the blanket the East-German family had left behind. I hope by now they are driving a Mercedes and also that they think of flying as we do, with fondness and pride!