“I thought I could use an airplane to build an imaginary bridge between West and East to show that a lot of people in Europe wanted to improve relations between our worlds.”

About Mathias Rust

Aviator • German

Mathias Rust is a German amateur aviator who gained international notoriety during the Cold War. In 1987, at the age of 18, he flew a rented Cessna 172 from Helsinki, Finland, through Soviet airspace and landed near Red...