Twenty-five years ago, on the warm spring evening of May 28, 1987, as the Soviet Union celebrated Border Guard's Day, a light single-engine Cessna-172R airplane landed gently at the very center of Moscow near Red Square. A tall man in a red jumpsuit climbed down from the cockpit, and, smiling in a friendly fashion, began signing autographs for members of the public who came running up to him. Barely 15 minutes after the landing, a police car pulled up, two men asked the pilot to get in the car, and it drove away.
That same evening, the sensational news spread around the world: West German amateur pilot Mathias Rust had taken off in a rented light sport plane from an airport near Helsinki, overcome the vaunted Soviet air defense system, and flew 530 miles to land in the heart of the Soviet Union. Headlines around the world screamed: “German boy punches through the Iron Curtain.” It was a complete shock.
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