Ondrej Vechter

* 1965

  • "They invited us to a session where they were waving with the Free Word newspaper, which started writing more openly on the first day, so one of the politruks (political officers), or if they were members of the counter-intelligence, [told us] that they had wanted to hang them in '68, just heartbreaking stories about how they suffered after '68. Of course they were fabricated stories, and of course it was broken by one of our fellow graduates, when they kept showing us all the things that the counterrevolutionary diary and subversive elements were writing about us and trying to subvert that socialist garden of ours, and he broke it by shouting to the audiemce, 'So when are you going to let us read it?' We hadn´t been allowed to read that daily. Much to the laughter of the rest, so the whole official event basically turned into a bit of a foolery. And then it just kind of took its own course. The way it was handled in the army, so you understand, was that sometime after the general strike, there was a general strike on Monday, when we were still forbidden to watch [TV]. Shortly thereafter, if I remember correctly, the clause in the constitution about the leadership of the party was abolished by the Federal Assembly, and the moment the leadership of the party was abolished, immediately thereafter the functions were abolished, they ceased to be objectively necessary, they ceased to have any reason to exist, the jobs of the political officers. So the posts of the political officers were abolished, but what to do with them? There were thousands of them everywhere. Graduates of the Klement Gottwald College of Politics in Bratislava. Basically, they did it by swapping them between departments and instead of the political officers they created the posts of edfucation counsellor. A political officer came from the airport in České Budějovice and we had a new mug, to put it pejoratively, called the education counsellor."

  • "The war would have been totally uninteresting if I hadn't joined the basic military service. I enlisted at Mošnov Airfield because I specialized as an airline operator at the college, CVO409 I think. That was the military specialty number, 409 airman-operator, which I had trained for during college. So I joined Mošnov, it was April 1, 1989. Until that time it was the same as forty years before, but that time was in the summer of 1989, when later after the entry process in Mošnov I was assigned to the unit in Bechyně, at the airport in Bechyně. That was part of the air defence of the state. That is, there were MiG-21 aircrafts that took off against a so-called trespasser that would come from the West and would somehow breach the border. Mostly they were sport aircraft strayed from Germany, from Switzerland. I've personally experienced that, when these MiGs took off. That's how the so-called emergency was raised. I was at the command post. This was a station somewhere underground, in a bunker, from where these fighters were guided to the targets, and it actually functioned as the central brain of that airfield from where the commands were generally issued. So that's where I spent the military service. By the summer of 1989, it was obvious that the regime was already worried about something happening when there was a so-called trespasser. I remember a Swiss airplane, so the first essential thing was that nothing should happen to it, that there shouldn't be some kind of trouble internationally, because glasnost had already reigned and really our regime was no longer the least interested in any kind of trouble. So it happened that the plane was guided to České Budějovice, to the aeroclub airport Hosín, and it landed there. State Security came there, the pilot was taken out, put up in a hotel, spent one night there, and the next day the fighter jets, which were meant for slow flying targets, albatrosses or L-39s, escorted him to the border and he continued on."

  • "He found out [he heard] some noise. He was engaged in some work of his own after taking off from Carlsbad. Before he knew it, he felt something on the back of his head, and that something was a gun. The whole crew was shocked to find out that there was a guy standing there with a gun and immediately tried to knock their headsets off. Take the headphones off immediately. They wanted to prevent communication. Despite being amateurs, the crew was probably pretty well prepared, at least they knew how to read a compass and they wanted to fly west, so they had kind of set something up to read a compass somewhere so that they would be able to define whether or not the plane was actually going west. The crew refused at first. Of course, they resisted it. There was a discussion afterwards, which ended with Captain Horáček saying, 'Well, hell, if you want to get somewhere in Germany, let him do it.' I mean, it was about my father as we were talking about the fact that that function of the navigator-telegrapher was crucialfor the pilots to know how to guide the plane along the route to get where they needed to go. And in this case, when they needed to get to West Germany, my father had to work. To communicate in some way. Of course, somehow fanatically one could fly by compass, without communication. But you have to realize that even the crew was aware that to fly across the Iron Curtain meant, without some kind of detailed announcement, that the crew could expect fighters to come out. The air defenses of the state, which can be very dangerous. The other thing is the weather. What it takes to successfully make that flight, it all has an impact on safety. So eventually they convinced him that he had to do something, so of course then he took his headset and started communicating with the dispatching in Prague, which of course was also left in shock, because when he announced that they had been attacked on board, of course there was a shock and from the area again, 'Repeat, repeat!' Some general principles and regulations existed even then, I confess I'm not an expert on the regulations at that time, but they were probably very vague in those days as far as hijacking was concerned. And to be notified by a Czechoslovakian Airlines plane, even the regional dispatching was shocked."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    ED Praha, 08.11.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:22:13
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    ED Praha, 02.03.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 02:17:23
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

No one else knew that the plane would not fly to Prague

Ondrej Vechter during recording in 2022
Ondrej Vechter during recording in 2022
photo: Post Bellum

Ondrej Vechter was born on 22 July 1965 in Poprad. His mother, Soňa Vechterová, née Klinčuchová, came from the family of partisan Pavel Klinčuch and his wife Irma Klinčuchová, who saved the village of Smrečany from being burned down by an SS punitive intervention during World War II. Pavol Klinčuch was wounded during the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. After 1945 he became a manager of a hotel in Tatranská Lomnica. However, due to his disapproval of the communist regime, he was dismissed after 1948 and sent as an accountant to a cement factory in eastern Slovakia. Ondrej Vechter’s father, also Ondrej, spent his childhood without his father, who emigrated to the USA in 1931. His father joined the army, but was attracted by airplanes, so he went into civilian life and started working as a radiotelegraph operator. Doing this job, on 8 June 1970 he joined the Czechoslovak Airlines (ČSA) flight OK 096 from Karlovy Vary to Prague, which was hijacked by a group of eight hijackers who decided to emigrate and chose this flight as their escape route. Ondrej Vechter was also interested in airplanes, and after graduating in 1983 he studied at the University of Transport and Communications in Žilina, majoring in air transport operations and economics. He joined the army on 1 April 1989 and lived through a wild year full of changes, ending with the fall of the communist regime and the abolition of the leading role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. After 1989 he became a transport pilot, first with Air Vítkovice, then with ČSA and finally with Smartwings, where he was still flying at the time of the interview in 2022.