Unwelcome Visitor

Imagine trying to peddle a film script about this teen-age pilot who took off from Helsinki, the capital of Finland, in a small single-engine Cessna 172 supposedly bound for Stockholm. A few hours later, having made his way unscathed through the highly vaunted Soviet air-defense system, he circles the Kremlin, buzzes Lenin’s tomb and lands at the edge of Red Square, where he signs autographs for Soviet and foreign tourists while the police smile for the cameras. All this on the annual holiday set aside to honor the glorious defenders of Soviet borders.

Until last Thursday, none of the studios would have read the script all the way through, let alone bought it. The fact that it actually happened has been greeted in the West with astonishment, great amusement and admiration for the navigation abilities of Mathias Rust, the 19-year-old pilot from Hamburg who had logged only 25 hours since getting his pilot’s license. Despite the glowering of official aviation circles in West Germany, Rust is a hero to the man in the street. And, somewhere, somebody is probably at work on a script.

But there were alternative scripts that nobody would find funny. Rust could have been shot down. As airline pilots now point out, his feat guarantees that the next plane wandering into Soviet territory is most unlikely to survive. He could have killed pedestrians in always-crowded Red Square.

Those who have tried to draw broad conclusions about the ease of penetrating Soviet air defenses are really off base. It is in fact easier to shoot down an intruding jet bomber or reconnaissance plane than a low-flying civilian light plane. If one insists on looking at the big picture, the most important aspect of the episode is the chance that it gave Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to clean house.

The commander of the Soviet air-defense forces has been summarily fired, and the defense minister himself, a 75-year-old whom Gorbachev reportedly wanted to get rid of anyway, has been allowed to “resign.” More military officers are expected to meet with quick, perhaps severe, punishment.

The fact remains that a German kid flying a rented small plane penetrated several rings of Soviet anti-aircraft defenses and landed in Red Square--the very symbol of Soviet power. That isn’t going to be easy to live down.