CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Mutiny in the Air Lanes

On runways at Czechoslovakia’s Bratislava, Brno and Moravska Ostrava, the morning planes for Prague roared off as usual one day last week. Aloft in the three state-owned airliners (DC-3s) were 85 passengers and crewmen. With them flew melodrama.

Captain Josef Klesnil, pilot of the plane from Brno, had flown 17 minutes on his northeasterly course when copilot and radioman pulled pistols on him. They ordered him to turn southwest. “Don’t joke,” said Klesnil. “If you go against our wishes,” said the mutineers, “we’ll blow your brains out.” For more than an hour, with pistols at his head, the captain flew southwest, beyond the Czech border to Munich, in the U.S. zone of Germany.

On the plane from Moravska Ostrava the pilot, pistol in hand, ordered the flight engineer’s hands bound, barked: “Stay behind and shut up!” Then, he, too, headed for Munich.

On the plane from Bratislava an American passenger, Katherine Kosmak, USIS librarian in Prague, noticed nothing amiss until the pilot began to circle for a landing. Then she heard a woman remark: “Oh, this isn’t Prague.” On the field below were U.S. military planes. In a hubbub of surprise and alarm, the liner rolled out, taxied up to the line. U.S. officers yanked open the hatch, yelled: “Get out, get out! No one is going to be hurt. You are in Munich. One of your pilots doesn’t like Czechoslovakia.”

It was the most spectacular group escape yet from the Red satellite region of Eastern Europe. U.S. intelligence men questioned the 85 closely. Two pilots said that the flight had been planned at an airport lunch the day before it occurred—they were “tired of Communist lies” and yearned for “freedom,” no matter where. Only 16 were in on the plot; 10 others took the chance in Munich to claim sanctuary as political refugees.

The other 59 wanted to go home. This week their wish was granted; among them was the U.S.’s Miss Kosmak, who was anxious to return to her job in Prague. The three planes that had borne them willy-nilly into a free land flew back behind the Iron Curtain.