The Flying Dutchman on Cloud Nine

Airborne over Austria - July 22, 1962  I was only 6 years old and on cloud nine (and in seventh heaven, too!) when the KLM pilots invited me inside the cockpit of the Lockheed L-188C Electra turboprop airliner (that took me on the Flight to Freedom) after it reached its cruising altitude.  It was probably this single event that sparked my interest in aeroplanes and that many years later inspired me to design my very own aviation website.

This flight, which originated in Sofia, Bulgaria, was the first of two flights, which took me away from the terror of communism and brought me to the freedom of the West.  It would take me to Amsterdam after a short refueling stop in Vienna, Austria.

The flight manifest indicated that there were only six passenger on board this aeroplane:  Simeon Groueff (my uncle), Radka Rizova (my mother), George Rizov (that’s me!), Vetka Tchaprachikova (a very dear friend of the family and distant cousin, too), Dominique Lapierre (a great French journalist and writer)  and Maurice Jarnoux (a photographer for Paris-Match).  We had the plane all to ourselves, and this was an aircraft that could easily hold over 100 passengers.

To find out more about this truly amazing journey, please read chapter 26 “My brother Boubi and sister Radka leave Bulgaria”  from the book My Odyssey by Stephane Groueff who was my uncle and who arranged for all this to happen.

Our next flight, which was on a KLM Douglas DC-8-32 jet, would take us from Amsterdam to Paris.