On Border Guard Day (May 28) in 1987, a light-engine aircraft, piloted by eighteen-year-old pilot Matthias Rust, landed on Red Square. This circumstance shocked the public: how could a young man fly more than a thousand kilometers and no one noticed him?
This story still remains a mystery, because there are so many accidents and happy coincidences in it. Therefore, various experts defend their radically opposite opinions about this extraordinary incident.
Biography
Matthias Rust was born in 1968 in the German city of Wedel. His father, Karl Rust, worked as an engineer for the AEG concern. Some publications write that he had a significant number of shares in the concern, but this is unconfirmed information. At least the Rust family was well off.
At about the age of five, Karl brought his son to work - to the airfield. Since then, the boy raved about flying and dreamed of getting behind the wheel of an iron machine as quickly as possible. Therefore, it is not surprising that at the age of eighteen he had already received a pilot's license. On this occasion, they wrote that Karl Rust probably contributed to this, because such licenses are issued only to experienced pilots, which Matthias could not be in his years.
Illegal flight
It is still unclear who persuaded the young pilot to make such a dangerous journey and expose himself to the risk of being shot down by air defense forces of any country. There is a version that youthful maximalism leaped into him, and he himself planned this adventurous trick. Then another question arises: how was an inexperienced pilot able to overcome all the difficulties of weather conditions, which were difficult for him to avoid?
When they began to understand this issue, it turned out that by the time of his arrival in the USSR, Rust had flown a lot: through Northern Europe and Iceland, and most of his routes passed over the sea. That is, he trained in order to then complete his main path, and so he got the necessary experience.
Second fact: when they examined Rust's plane, instead of the rear seats, they found built-in fuel tanks. This was done in order to be able to fly long distances.
One question remains: did he invent and did it himself, or did someone help or guide him? There are several such questions, because the pilot's behavior was incomprehensible and inexplicable from the point of view of logic.
Take, for example, the fact that in the dispatch service of the city of Helsinki Rust left a mark that he was flying to Stockholm. He took off and for the first twenty minutes walked along the designated route, and then turned off the radio and disappeared from the connection. The dispatcher managed to track that Matthias turned towards the Soviet border.
Experts say that he was not noticed by Soviet anti-aircraft weapons only because he flew at an altitude of eighty to one hundred meters above the water, as they teach military pilots, in order to remain unnoticed for longer. This is also one of the oddities in this case.
Finnish rescuers flew in search immediately after the disappearance of Rust's plane from the radar and found an oil slick on the water. They mistook the spot for the plane crash site and stopped searching. It is unclear what this stain was, but this coincidence helped Matthias go unnoticed.
Further, his flight begins to resemble a detective story or a thriller: heading towards the border of the USSR, he wanted to fly past the city of Kohtla-Järve. And here he was escorted by missilemen of the 14th Air Defense Division of the Leningrad Army. Rust's plane was targeted and could have been shot down at any moment, but they did not, because they still remembered the incident with the Korean Boeing, which took place only three years ago. After this incident, there was a strict order not to touch the "civilians". It is not known whether the young pilot was informed about this, but it definitely helped him.
And in general, he was phenomenally lucky that time: the weather turned bad, and Soviet pilots could not see the plane flying low above the ground. And then he got into the "invisibility zone" - the so-called zone of responsibility of two air defense units, between which there was an unmonitored corridor. It is unlikely that a young pilot accidentally got into this zone if he did not know its exact coordinates.
Later, it was again spotted, already by other air defense schnicks, but was mistaken for a dense flock of birds, again due to poor visibility.
Further, in general, everything looks like a fairy tale: when approaching Moscow, he appeared on the radars during training flights at 15.00, when the identification codes were changing, and no one asked for him. And at that time, there was an aircraft accident near the city of Torzhok, and helicopters and airplanes flew there to search. For one of these "assistants" took the plane of Matthias.
Landing in Moscow and court
Rust was spotted directly near Moscow, then in the area of the Sheremetyevo airport. They even canceled flight departures. The pilot did not answer any inquiries, and there was no point in chasing him with military aircraft over Moscow.
Three times Rust tried to land the plane right on Red Square, but all attempts were unsuccessful. Then he decided to land a light motor boat on the Moskvoretsky bridge. It is good that at this moment the traffic police turned on the traffic lights, otherwise there would have been a disaster. Rust landed the plane in a narrow gap between the trolleybus power grids - a filigree work of an inexperienced pilot, isn't it?
Then, under his own power, he taxied to the Intercession Cathedral, where he was arrested.
For more than a year, Matias Rust was in the USSR, an investigation was underway in this case. Then he was expelled from the country of the Soviets. At the trial, he blamed everything on chance, but for experts these explanations seem unfounded.
After this extraordinary event, many military officials were stripped of their posts and replaced by others, who allowed Gorbachev to make concessions to NATO to reduce the armed forces of the USSR. Perhaps this is the key to all coincidences and accidents?
Epilogue
Journalists are still interested in Rust's life, and this is what they found out. He did not receive any education, and he was also deprived of his pilot's license. He did not make a career out of his flight and was once found insane for assaulting a nurse. After that, he left for India and there he arranged his personal life: he married an Indian woman.
