On Border Guard Day (May 28), in 1987, a light-engine aircraft landed on Red Square, which was flown by eighteen-year-old pilot Matthias Rust. This circumstance shocked the public: how could a young man fly more than a thousand kilometers, and no one noticed him?
This story is still a mystery, because there are so many accidents and happy coincidences. 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, Carl Rust, worked as an engineer at AEG. Some publications write that he had a significant number of shares in the concern, but this is unconfirmed information. At least the Rustov family was well off.
At about the age of five, Carl brought his son to work - at the airport. Since then, the boy raved about flights and dreamed of getting into the helm of an iron car as quickly as possible. Therefore, it is not surprising that at the age of eighteen he 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 put himself at risk of being shot down by air defense forces of any country. There is a version that youthful maximalism leaped in 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 that were difficult for him to avoid?
When they began to understand this issue, it turned out that Rust had flown a lot by the time he arrived in the USSR: through Northern Europe and Iceland, and most of its routes passed over the sea. That is, he trained to then do his main path, and so got the necessary experience.
The 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 it and do it, or did someone help or direct him? There are several such questions, because the pilot's behavior was incomprehensible and inexplicable in terms of logic.
Take, for example, the fact that Rust left a mark in the dispatching service of the city of Helsinki that he was flying to Stockholm. He took off and the first twenty minutes walked along the designated route, and then turned off the radio and disappeared from communication. 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-one hundred meters above the water, as military pilots are taught to go unnoticed longer. This is also one of the oddities in this matter.
Finnish rescuers flew out in search immediately after the disappearance of Rust's plane from the radar and found an oil stain on the water. They took this spot for the place of the death of the aircraft and stopped searching. It is not clear what this spot was, but this coincidence helped Matthias go unnoticed.
Then his flight begins to look like a detective 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 rockets of the 14th Air Defense Division of the Leningrad Army. They took Rust’s plane at gunpoint and could shoot down at any moment, but didn’t do it because they still remembered the incident with the Korean Boeing that happened just 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.
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 fell into the "invisibility zone" - the so-called zone of responsibility of the two parts of the air defense, between which there was an unmonitored corridor. It is unlikely that by chance a young pilot fell into this zone if he did not know its exact coordinates.
Later it was spotted again, already by other air defense officers, but it 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 radar during training flights at 15.00, when the identification codes changed, and no one asked for him. And at that time, there was a plane crash near the city of Torzhok, and helicopters and planes flew up to search for it. For one of these "assistants" took the plane Matthias.
Landing in Moscow and the court
Rust was spotted directly near Moscow, then in the vicinity of Sheremetyevo Airport. There even canceled flights departures. The pilot did not answer any queries, 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 on Moskvoretsky bridge. It is good that at this moment the traffic police turned on the traffic lights, otherwise a catastrophe would have occurred. Rust landed a plane in a narrow gap between trolleybus power networks - the filigree work of an inexperienced pilot, is not it?
Then, under his own power, he taxied to the Intercession Cathedral, where he was arrested.
For more than a year, Matthias Rust was in the USSR, an investigation was conducted on this case. Then he was expelled from the country of councils. At the trial, he blamed everything on chance, but for experts these explanations seem unfounded.
After this extraordinary event, many military officials lost their posts. Others replaced them, allowing Gorbachev to make NATO concessions to reduce the USSR's armed forces. Perhaps this is the solution to all coincidences and accidents?
