I have an old book here, entitled “On the highways of the sky”. Published in the 60’s in Hungary and translated from the original East-German edition, it did reflect the spirit of the times but for me at age 13 or 14 it was the most wonderful book ever. It talked about all the fascinating things that were already pulling me towards a career in aviation.
There was a sentence in the book, advising air travelers to pack their cameras in the checked baggage. Of course… making photos from aircraft, even passenger aircraft, must have been anathema to the regimes in Eastern Europe back then. I remembered this sentence every time we flew and as a kid often wondered what the always polite and nice Malev cabin crew would have done had I kept my camera with me. On a flight with Aeroflot with a cabin crew perfectly capable of upsetting the balance of the aircraft had they congregated at the aft galley, I did not even wonder any more…
Several years later my dream came true and I started working at Ferihegy airport. Like all such places, Ferihegy too had its share of old stories and as the new boy in town, I was an avid listener whenever the old hands started to reminisce.
One story had a particular relevance to my earlier experience with the camera…
It took several years after WWII and the communist take over in Hungary before the authorities allowed a new aeronautical map of the country to be produced and the product was similar to what ICAO prescribed for each member country, the famous 1:500 000 chart. The Hungarian version had to have certain distortions included (to confuse the enemy) and of course there was only one airport, that of Budapest, shown on it. It was a map that was perfectly harmless yet it was still classified as sensitive. The result was that although it was ok to display it on the wall of the Air Traffic Services Reporting Office (the place where you file flight plans) at Ferihegy airport but it had to be hidden behind a curtain whenever flight crews of Western airlines were present. The paranoia of the regime back then was quite spectacular…
One foggy and wet fall day a Lufthansa aircraft landed at Ferihegy because of problems at its destination. The flight crew came to the reporting office and the guys there scrambled to draw the curtain across the secret map. The captain came to the officer on duty and asked her whether he could have a map of Hungary… Suspicious, very suspicious… a subject of the Federal Republic, having landed with such a weak excuse and now asking for a map of the country… this must be a trick. She told him shaken but politely that unfortunately she could not help him. The gray haired skipper shook his head and asked for a car to go back to the aircraft. This was ok… in a few minutes he returned with his flight bag and extracted a Jepp map which made the Hungarians in the office stare incredulously. It was a sectional map of Hungary with all military airports, all utility airports and every other “secret” clearly shown, not omitting the number of runways and their orientation either.
The Lufthansa crew finished their flight plan swiftly but before they left, the four striper handed over the map, nicely folded, to the duty officer, saying with a grin on his face something like “now you have a map”.
The Hungarians had a major problem now. They had a map all right but it was a map you would not want to be seen with if you planned to see your family again. In the end, they did the only right thing they could in the circumstances. They called the local State Security rep and handed him the map. The man took it with a glum expression and took off without comment. The map was never seen again.
It was several years later that we heard about the map and how it was classified top-secret and locked in some safe at the ministry of the interior. That every Lufthansa flight had something similar on board did not matter.
Compared to this, the advice to keep my camera in the hold baggage was understandable, don’t you think?
