Ondrej Vechter

"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."