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On August 4, 1984, at 4 a.m., the slumbering predawn calm over Vienna was rent by a lawnmower-like whine. The sound was initially faint, an irritating mosquito. But it gradually swelled to a raspy, grating two-stroke crescendo raking Vienna’s rooftops.

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The racket came from the engine of a Trabant, that reliably unreliable car manufactured not far away in communist East Germany at the plant in Zwickau. The Trabant engine came in hot from the east at around 700 feet, then lazily circled over the sleeping city with no apparent plan. The noisy little two-stroke wasn’t flying solo. Rotating on the engine’s drive shaft whirred a fiberglass propeller. Engine and prop were bolted to the backend of a skeletal go-kart contraption with a hammock-like seat and landing gear consisting of three wheels previously employed by wheelbarrows. A motorcycle gas tank was mounted atop the engine. Holding the entire assemblage aloft in the graying Vienna morning was a 30-foot pair of collapsible hang glider wings.

Recumbent in the hammock seat sat a man wearing an orange-and-black-striped motorcycle helmet.

The man and his flying machine took an aerial tour of the city, casually buzzing the slow-rolling Danube and grand boulevards, then approached Vienna International Airport. He throttled back the whining engine to a loud putter, dropping the go-kart’s altitude ever lower until the wheelbarrow wheels touched down on a taxiway. He maneuvered his aircraft under the wing of a Boeing jet and came to a halt next to a hangar, where the Trabant guttered to a stop, a filthy white ghost of exhaust dissipating into the air. There was a momentary hush. Then someone on the early, early shift at the airport took notice. Uniformed maintenance men ran out of the hangar, waving their arms and shouting in German. The man in the go-kart calmly climbed out of his hammock onto the tarmac. He removed his helmet and held out an expired Czechoslovak passport. In halting English, Ivo Zdarsky declared, “I would like to claim political asylum.”

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