Word: popescu
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dissidents from Eastern Europe have fled westward in recent years in everything from hot-air balloons to homemade tanks, but last week Aurel Popescu, 27, established a first. He and the 19 relatives he brought with him were the first Rumanian defectors to flee in a crop duster...
...Popescu's two-hour, 300-mile hedgehop from the Rumanian town of Arad to Feldbach, an Austrian village ten miles inside the Austro-Hungarian frontier, in a single-engine Antonov2 biplane was almost flight-plan perfect. He loaded his passengers on a craft designed for no more than 14 people, then flew 150 ft. above ground across Rumania and Hungary into Austria. After dodging high-tension wires, mountaintops, watchtowers, even barbed-wire fences, he made a bumpy landing in a rain-soaked cornfield, where Farmer Herbert Kaspar, 50, was working. Reported Kaspar: "For a while there was no sound...
...week's end Popescu and his clan were awaiting word from the Austrian government on whether their request for political asylum would be granted...