Zagreb, Yugoslavia - July 6, 1991  Look ma, no hands!  It must have been on automatic pilot.  Does anyone remember the automatic pilot in the movie “Airplane”? The crew of this Balkan flight from Brussels to Sofia was very friendly.  The captain himself lived just a few blocks away on the same street in Sofia where I lived when I was a kid.  It was really nice of him to invite my inside the cockpit.  When I left Bulgaria at the age of 6, I also went inside the cockpit of an airplane: It was inside a KLM Lockheed L-188C Electra while en route from Sofia to Amsterdam.  It was the flight that I took to escape from the Iron Curtain.  Here I am, 29 years later, inside the cockpit of an airliners again, and on my first trip back to my native country.  Now that was quite a coincidence!  (Photo by George Rizov)