Mira Slovak, who as a young airline pilot in 1953 fled Communist Czechoslovakia by hijacking his own commercial flight to West Germany, died on June 16 at his home in Fallbrook, Calif. Mr. Slovak, who went on to become a hydroplane racing champion, a stunt flyer and an airline pilot, was 84.
The cause was stomach cancer, said David Williams, the executive director of the Hydroplane and Raceboat Museum in Kent, Wash. Mr. Williams had interviewed Mr. Slovak many times in recent years for a planned biography.
Mr. Slovak, then in his early 20s, was the captain of a Czechoslovak Airlines DC-3 when, on the night of March 23, 1953, he and a few others on board carried out the hijacking. They had spent months planning it.
Shortly after takeoff, with more than 20 passengers aboard, Mr. Slovak locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit. He then took the plane on a sharp dive to help subdue others and to drop the plane to below 1,000 feet, where radar would not detect it.
The plane, scheduled to fly from Prague to Brno, Czechoslovakia, landed at a military base in Frankfurt about an hour later. Mr. Slovak said he had navigated the night flight with the help of moonlight above and neon lights from businesses below, electric evidence that he had entered the West.
Requesting political asylum, he was questioned in Europe and the United States for several months before being allowed to live freely in the United States. But his status as a Communist initially prevented him from getting a commercial pilot’s license, Mr. Williams said. So Mr. Slovak found one way to fly that required few credentials: dusting crops.
Before the decade was done, he had flown crop dusters in jobs across the West, doused wildfires from the air and worked as a personal pilot for Bill Boeing Jr., son of the Boeing Company’s founder.
He was introduced to Mr. Boeing through a connection he had made while spraying fields in Washington State. Mr. Boeing introduced him to hydroplanes.
By the late 1950s, Mr. Slovak was skimming along the water’s surface at more than 150 miles per hour en route to sports-page glory, some of it at the helm of Mr. Boeing’s boat, Miss Wahoo.
In 1958, Mr. Slovak won a national championship driving Miss Bardahl, owned by a Seattle oil company. The next year he was driving Miss Wahoo when he won the President’s Cup on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. He continued racing through 1967, winning another national championship. (He took his last lap in a hydroplane at age 81, reaching 140 m.p.h.)
In 1959, when he went to work for Continental Airlines as a pilot; he settled down, relatively speaking, performing only the occasional stunt in a biplane. Flying under bridges, upside down and arms overhead, was how he relaxed. His daring feats earned him the nickname the Flying Czech.
“Mira flew upside down more than most people flew right side up,” Mr. Williams said.
Mira John Slovak was born on Oct. 25, 1929, in the town of Cifer, which was then in Czechoslovakia and is now in Slovakia. His parents were farmers who hid Jewish refugees during the Nazi occupation. Mr. Slovak told Mr. Williams that a rail line carrying Jews to concentration camps passed near their land. He remembered taking cigarettes and food to Nazi soldiers to win their trust, then giving cigarettes and food to the Jews on the train.
He joined the Czechoslovak Air Force shortly after World War II, when he was 17, and flew bombers at 19. He was promoted to captain at 21, in part because the new Communist government was replacing officers who had been aligned with Allied forces during the war. By the time he was 21, he was piloting commercial flights for Czechoslovak Airlines.
At first, he said in a video interview late in life, “I was more scared than the passengers.”
He is survived by his companion Ingrid Bondi, a former flight attendant for Continental with whom he lived for nearly three decades. Mr. Slovak’s two marriages ended in divorce.
Mr. Williams said Mr. Slovak had flown 38,500 hours in various planes, though most of the time was on long routes for Continental. He made more than 800 Pacific crossings for the airline before retiring in 1986. He later imported and sold planes, some of them made in Czechoslovakia.
Mr. Slovak survived several crashes in boats and planes. In hydroplane racing he broke an arm, a leg and his back; lost most of his teeth; and damaged his kidneys before he was out of his 30s. He spent his recovery time planning his return to the cockpit, even as some competitors on the water died racing.
In 1968, he installed an engine from a Volkswagen Beetle into a glider and flew it more than 8,000 miles, from West Germany to California. He crashed 19 feet from the runway at his final destination, Santa Paula. He spent several days in a coma.
“I’m in love with one person,” Mr. Slovak told Sports Illustrated in 1966. “That’s Mira Slovak. I don’t want to kill myself, but things can happen when you play around with speed. The law of averages catches up.
“All of us,” he added, “have been banged up, burned, bounced around. We’re all prepared to face the consequences. I have and I am, but I always come back for more.”
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