First hijack of an aircraft

The first hijacking of an aircraft in flight was carried out in March or April 1919 by Hungarian aristocrat Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás (Báró Felsőszilvási Nopcsa Ferenc). Worried for his safety following a communist uprising in his native Hungary, Franz forged papers authorizing him to requisition an aircraft and pilot to fly him from Budapest to Sopron. When the aircraft was a little more than half-way to its destination, over the town of Győr, Hungary, Franz pulled out his pistol and ordered the pilot to fly him to Vienna, Austria.

Franz Nopcsa lived an extraordinary life, so much so that writers often edit this incident out in favour of other, even wilder stories. He was a world-renowned palaeontologist whose works are still cited to this day, a respected authority on the history and culture of the Balkans, a widely-travelled adventurer and government spy, and he once made a credible bid to become King of Albania.

Nopcsa was born in 1877 into a family that combined vast wealth and power with a reputation for eccentricity. His ancestors included a Baron who reputedly moonlighted as a highwayman and a courtier who was still fighting pistol duels with his political opponents until the turn of the 20th century.

The direction of Nopcsa's life started to take shape in 1895, when his sister found a set of fossilized bones on the family estate near what is now Deva, Romania (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Nopcsa was fascinated by this discovery, and brought the bones with him when he went to Vienna for university. His professors encouraged his interest, pushing him to conduct fieldwork and read up on every branch of science that might be of use. Nopcsa taught himself anatomy, zoology and geology – using his title and influence to get introductions to the most eminent academics of his age.

By the age of 22, Nopcsa was learned enough to have formed his own theories about the dinosaurs he had found (including a previously unknown hadrosaur) and backed them up with extensive research. He returned to Vienna to give a series of lectures that showcased what would become his trademark combination of brilliance and tactlessness, impressing and offending the scientific establishment in equal measure.

Over the course of his palaeontological career, Nopcsa made numerous important contributions including the discovery of examples of insular dwarfism and sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs. He also wrote on the brood-rearing behaviour of dinosaurs and their evolutionary relationship with birds. He remained something of an outsider, however, and many of his theories would not be revisited and confirmed until decades later.

In addition to his palaeontological research, Nopcsa was also a multilingual adventurer who travelled throughout Europe and the near east. He had a special fascination with Albania – then a lawless region on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire. His adventures in Albania, usually travelling by motorbike, included being held hostage by bandit chieftains, and running afoul of corrupt local officials and warlords. It was during these travels in 1906 that he met his lifelong companion, Bajazid Doda, who was a young Albanian man from an obscure mountain village.

From this point until the outbreak of World War I, Nopcsa and Doda travelled throughout Albania and the Balkans conducting geological fieldwork, gathering anthropological data and also compiling military and political intelligence for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Periodically, the two men would reappear in one of the grand hotels of Budapest or Vienna, dressed in peasant clothes and telling wild stories of their exploits. Nopsca would usually deliver some lectures, submit some academic papers to various journals and then the pair would disappear again as suddenly as they had come.

This lifestyle was brought to an end by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. With the frontier closed, Nopcsa's nomadic life became much more constrained, and the pace of the academic world slowed to a standstill as funding was suspended and students called off to war. The bankrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up by the treaties that confirmed the post-war peace, and Nopcsa – an aristocrat whose first language was German – found himself living in the rural east of Hungary during a time of political unrest.

Although his daring aircraft hijacking allowed him to escape Hungary, he arrived in Vienna as a penniless refugee. His estate in Deva was seized by the state and his acerbic personality meant that he struggled to get teaching work. Nopcsa lived with Doda in an apartment in Vienna, making a living by dealing in fossils (including selling off his own extensive collection). In the spring of 1933, having been all but forgotten by his former friends and academic peers, Nopcsa seemed to have fallen into a deep depression. On the morning of 26 April, he shot Bajazid Doda while he slept, then turned the gun on himself.