Next: Flight of Fancy, the Movie

--Two years after his daring flight into Moscow’s Red Square landed him in prison, West Germany’s Mathias Rust is keeping his feet much closer to the ground. Authorities in Wedel, a Hamburg suburb, refused to reinstate his pilot’s license, so he has taken up horseback riding. Rust, now 21, had hoped to meet Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev after his May 28, 1987, flight through Soviet airspace in a single-engine Cessna. Instead, he was arrested and convicted of violating international air safety regulations, illegal entry into the Soviet Union and malicious hooliganism. He was sentenced to four years but released early. Soviet Defense Minister Sergei L. Sokolov and Air Defense chief Alexander Koldunov were ousted because their commands took no action to stop Rust. The grounded pilot says he is working on a book and screenplay about his flight, and that he has rejected offers of as much as $500,000 for the movie rights because U.S. film makers would not allow him to write the script. In the fall, he will enter the Civilian Service, a pacifist alternative to compulsory military duty. He plans to serve at a hospital so he can work in that field should he fail to regain his pilot’s license to pursue his first goal, flying for a charter service.

--A U.S. postage stamp honoring Ernest Hemingway will go on sale July 17 in Key West, Fla., to coincide with the annual Hemingway Days Festival there. The 25-cent commemorative stamp will be available elsewhere one day after it is issued in Key West, where the Nobel Prize-winning author wrote some of his most acclaimed books. The stamp’s depiction of a bearded Hemingway in turtleneck sweater was taken from a Yousuf Karsh photograph.

--Forty-five years after the 10 crewmen of a B-24 Liberator bomber were killed in a crash on Mt. Holyoke, a Massachusetts man realized his dream of turning the area into a monument to them. Frank Tencza stumbled upon the crash site in 1958, when he was 14, and came to regard it as sacred ground. The crew perished while flying a stepped-up training schedule 10 days before the Allied invasion of France. Tencza dedicated a granite monument nearly eight feet high--carved, engraved and donated by Allen Williams of Otis, Mass.--at a ceremony also attended by survivors and friends of the crewmen and by military officials. Clyde Dechert, 45, son of Liberator flight engineer Sgt. Wilburn Dechert, said he showed up so he could meet others who might help him learn more about his father. He said: “I was only 3 months old when he died.”