Fantastic story. That’s too bad how it turned out. Looks like he claimed to have had a pilot’s license that was suspended/revoked after the first shenanigans. Went on the be a steamfitter, but could have been a good pilot, had he reigned in his temperament. Maybe it was for the better.
Reminds me of Mathias Rust, when at the age of 18 and with 50 hours of flying experience he flew a Cessna from an airport in Helsinki and landed it in Moscow's Red Square at the height of the cold war.
He wanted to reduce tension and build a bridge between the west and the east, but mostly succeeded in embarrassing the hell out of the Soviets -- the air defense system tracked him multiple times throughout his flight and even scrambled interceptors twice to locate him, ultimately taking no action both times.
The first fighter pilot misidentified him as a Soviet plane, and the second presumably made a report identifying him as a foreign Cessna but was either not believed or the information was not followed up on.
Soviet radar continued to track him throughout, at one point their systems noticed that Mathias failed to change his transponder code on schedule to identify himself as friendly and flagged him as "hostile". A commander manually overrode that identification, flagging him as "friendly" because he didn't want to shoot down what he presumed was a forgetful Soviet student pilot.
He continued on, with the Soviets assuming he was a student pilot, or a training flight, or an airplane on an SAR operation.
The Soviets only realized something was horribly wrong when the little Cessna cleared all of the anti-missile defenses and made for a landing in the Red Square. His reception was festive:
>He got out of the Cessna. Expecting to be stormed by hordes of troops and KGB agents, Rust leaned against the aircraft and waited. The people in Red Square seemed nervous or stunned, not sure what was going on. Some thought Rust’s airplane might be Gorbachev’s private aircraft, or that it was all part of a movie production. But once the crowd realized that Rust and the Cessna were foreign—and that he’d just pulled off one of the most sensational exploits they had ever witnessed—they drew closer.
>“A big crowd had formed around me,” Rust says. “People were smiling and coming up to shake my hand or ask for autographs. There was a young Russian guy who spoke English. He asked me where I came from. I told him I came from the West and wanted to talk to Gorbachev to deliver this peace message that would [help Gorbachev] convince everybody in the West that he had a new approach.”
He did succeed in helping Gorbachev, however. The double-whammy of Mathias' actions and the Chernobyl disaster proved to him that the Soviet system was ineffective and inflexible and convinced him to implement reforms.
>One German periodical published a story saying Rust did the stunt on a bet. Another reported that he did it to impress a girl. Yet another said he did it in order to drop leaflets seeking to free nonagenarian Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s lieutenant, from jail. The Communist newspaper Pravda accused Rust of being a patsy in an international plot in which he was supposed to have been shot down and killed in order to provoke an international incident. However ridiculous the rumors were, the Soviets methodically looked into every allegation.
>On June 23, 1987, the Soviets completed their investigation. Shortly afterward, prosecutors charged Rust with illegal entry, violation of flight laws, and “malicious hooliganism.” Rust pleaded guilty to all but the last charge. There was, he argued, nothing malicious in his intentions.
As Mathias said,
>“I thought my chances of actually getting to Moscow were about 50-50, [...] but I was convinced I was doing the right thing—I just had to dare to do it.”
Rust was somewhat unstable psychologically, and later was sentenced to 30 months in jail because he had stabbed a young nurse in the GDR hospital he worked in after she refused to kiss him.
Later he became a professional poker player.
The plane is now in the Deutsche Technikmuseum in Berlin.
The stunt also helped Gorbachev in reigning in the military: he sent Minister of Defence Sergei Sokolov and the head of the Soviet Air Defence Forces Alexander Koldunov "into well-earned early retirement by their own request" and got rid of some 300 generals opposing his reforms.
