Freedom-Bound by Air

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, no movement. Finally a door opened, and the pilot got out. 'Austria?' he asked. I said, 'Ja, Austria.' He began smiling and sobbing."

At week's end Popescu and his clan were awaiting word from the Austrian government on whether their request for political asylum would be granted.

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