The Notorious Flight of Mathias Rust
Ronald Reagan was president, there was still a Soviet Union, and a 19-year-old pilot set out to change the world.
- By Tom LeCompte
- Air & Space Magazine, July 01, 2005
ON A MILD SPRING DAY IN LATE MAY 1987, military analyst John Pike was at the U.S. embassy in Moscow on business when he looked out the window and saw a small airplane circling over Red Square. Gee, that’s peculiar, thought Pike. There’s no private aviation in the Soviet Union. Hell, there’s no private anything.
The aircraft belonged to West German teenager Mathias Rust—or, more accurately, to Rust’s flying club. In a daring attempt to ease cold war tensions, the 19-year-old amateur pilot had flown a single-engine Cessna nearly 550 miles from Helsinki to the center of Moscow—probably the most heavily defended city on the planet—and parked it at the base of St. Basil’s Cathedral, within spitting distance of Lenin’s tomb. Newspapers dubbed the pilot “the new Red Baron” and the “Don Quixote of the skies.” The stunt became one of the most talked-about aviation feats in history. But it was politics, not fame, that motivated Rust.
There is nothing in Rust’s neat two-bedroom apartment outside Berlin—no mementos, no photographs, no framed newspaper headlines—nothing at all to indicate that for a few short weeks 18 years ago he was the most famous pilot in the world. But the memory of the flight has stayed fresh. “It seems like it happened yesterday,” says Rust, now 36. “It’s alive in me.”
As a child in Hamburg, Rust had been preoccupied by two things: flying and nuclear Armageddon. Belligerence and distrust marked East-West relations of the time. U.S. President Ronald Reagan seemed to be on a personal crusade against the Soviet Union. Many Germans were on edge. “There was a real sense of fear,” Rust says, “because if there was a conflict, we all knew we would be the first to be hit.”
To many Europeans, Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy to the Soviet leadership in 1985 offered a glimmer of hope. Glasnost, his policy of transparency in government, and perestroika, economic reforms at home, were radical departures from the policies of his predecessors. So when the U.S.-Soviet summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 ended without an arms reduction deal, Rust felt despair. He was particularly angered by Reagan’s reflexive mistrust of the Soviet Union, which Rust felt had blinded the president to the historic opportunity Gorbachev presented.
Rust decided he must do something—something big. He settled on the idea of building an “imaginary bridge” by flying to Moscow. If he could reach the Soviet capital, if he could “pass through the Iron Curtain without being intercepted, it would show that Gorbachev was serious about new relations with the West,” says Rust. “How would Reagan continue to say it was the ‘Empire of Evil’ if me, in a small aircraft, can go straight there and be unharmed?” Rust also prepared a 20-page manifesto he planned to deliver to Gorbachev on how to advance world peace.
Rust had taken his first flying lessons only a couple of years before his decision to fly to Moscow. A data processor at a mail-order trinket company, he spent all of his money (and some of his parents’) flying. But by the spring of 1987, he had barely 50 hours of licensed flight time, and had completed just a handful of cross-country trips.
“I thought my chances of actually getting to Moscow were about 50-50,” Rust says, noting that in 1983, the Soviets blew Korean Airlines flight 007 out of the sky after it strayed into Soviet airspace near the Kamchatka Peninsula; all 269 persons aboard were killed. “But I was convinced I was doing the right thing—I just had to dare to do it.”
Related topics: Aviators 20th Century Aviation
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Comments (6)
As of June 2009, C-172 D-ECJB has been reported as being acquired by the German technical museum in Berlin for display. [Flypast magazine]
Posted by Peter Chapman on June 14,2009 | 12:56 AM
I just listened to the "Dead Hand" by David Hoffman on CSPAN on Book TV recorded Oct 19 2009.
He says that this had a pretty big impact on what Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was later able to do. Because he was able to retire tons of the old line generals and their lieutenant's. So David Hoffman's book very much agrees with your wonderful article.
What a great guy "Mathias Rust" was and still is. Good on you mate!
M.D. IV
Posted by Miles Digby on January 17,2010 | 02:21 PM
I remember an ad in Av Week & Space technology showing the 172 flown by Mathias Rust sitting in Red square. I would love to have a re-print of that ad!
This had to be one of the top 10 most remarkable flights accomplished in the history of aviation:
Orville Wright at Kittyhawk
Glenn Curtiss from Albany to New York
Charles Lindbergh to Paris
Chuck Yeager breaking the soundbarrier
Jimmy Dolittle's Tokyo raid
Mathias Rust to Red Square
The Enola Gay to Hiroshima
Dick Rutan & Jena Yeager around the world
Every flight of the X-15
My first solo in 1972
Posted by Albert yowell on January 31,2010 | 06:58 PM
I don't want to sound picky, but how does a MiG-23 have "nearly" three times the wingspan of a Cessna? I grew up on C-150, which has a 10-m span, and I thought the MiG-23 had a wingspan of under 15 m. This kind of "nearly" reminds me of a mechanic who once gave me an "estimated" quote of $250, and then a bill for $500. When I pointed out the obvious, he held up his hand and said with great emphasis, "A-b-o-u-t; I said ABOUT $250". Ughh.
Posted by Lucas Groves on February 28,2010 | 05:55 AM
This "wonderful" man was later imprisoned in Germany for stabbing and inflicting life-threatening injuries to a woman who rejected his romantic advances. Some years later he was also found guilty of theft and fraud.
Posted by chephy on April 1,2010 | 05:35 PM
I came across this name while reading about flying VOR om the net as a flight simmer. It was a humorous writer who refered to him in reference to restricted flight zones.
Needless to say this article is superbly written and is neither too cluttered or scant. It has a "human soul in it" and is not intrusive in any way. Has the writer ever thought of writing a movie script specifically for this case?
It is so touching. In our young years we have sometimes pulled feats of naivety which cloaked in innocence have succeeded against all logical odds.
Is there a movie on this mission?
Posted by Gitonga Cyrus on December 18,2010 | 03:37 AM