“We were all Communists, naturally, at that time. But what played against me and why they picked Vladimir, that’s what I can’t tell you.”
“You said that his father was an officer so maybe this played a part”?
“His father was the commander of the Czechoslovak Air Force but whether this played a role, that’s what I can’t judge. One day, we were already at Baikonur, two days before the launch, only then we got to know who was going to fly. Two days! Simply, general Shatalov, that was commander-in-chief, cosmonaut from that team, with some paper and he said: “We sent an inquiry to Prague, to your Central Committee of the Communist Party to Mr. Husák [then the chairman of the Central Committee and President of Czechoslovakia], asking who should fly. The answer was that Vladimír Remek is going to fly.‘ Full stop. What to say? Nothing. Yessir. In the army, one says ‘yessir’. The most disappointed person was my commander Rukavichnikov. We shared a room. When the decision was announced, he said nothing. Poker face. But when we went to our room, he said: ‘Oldřich, come, I have a bottle of wine, we need to drink it, fuckit, because that decision pissed me.’ So we opened a bottle of wine, drank it, cursed for a while but such is life.”
„I watched with the delegation that flew from Czechoslovakia. Who was its head… some bigwig from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, I think it was one Lenárt. We were right at Baikonur on such an observation platform and it was interesting because under that platform, there was a sort of bunker where a celebration of the launch was held. Vodka poured, there were canapés, people were talking and suddenly, the loudspeakers announced: ‚Attention, launch in five minutes.’ And everyone run up to the platform. But that view that you have from that platform! Among others, that platform is about two kilometres from the spacecraft but when the motors ignite, the platform shakes, you tremble and you look at that wonder of science and engineering, how it launches and within ten minutes, it’s on the orbit.”
“One night, suddenly a thundering roar, planes are flying, all that clamour. In the morning, I came to the airport and there were Russians. And a tank. In front of the gate, in front of the airport, there stood a tank. I thought: “For goodness’ sake, what’s going on here?’ Obviously, the airport was taken over by the Russian airmen. I was a senior lieutenant then so I was grounded. All pilots in Czechoslovakia were grounded. For several months before it got all sorted out. We were observing the situation, as they say. So, our spaces, instruction rooms, regimental headquarters and sich, they did not care much about it. We could go there. We could live there with them, sure. But we couldn‘t fly. There was a flying ban.”
“The Russians classified it as ‘garnizon’. It‘s a town which is surrounded by a fence and there’s army-style order. One has to have a permit to enter, there is a guard at the gate and so on. But there are shops and a cinema and all public amenities. So, that Monino, it was exactly like this, it was a garnizon. [Note: In Soviet classification, there existed a category of urban-type settlement which had different legal standing than a town, and these had several subtypes. Monino was so-called work settlement because its main purpose was industry-related in a wide sense, in contrast with recreational or agricultural urban-type settlements.]For us coming from Central Europe, it was different from what we knew But you need to understand that this is a different world. Russians explained it their way, they told us: ‘You know, when we want to be armed, and we have to be armed, we invest a lot of money in jet fighters and tanks and everything so do not wonder that we do not have such a high standard of living.’ But those conditions were livable, it was not that bad.”
“When the Russians chose the cosmonauts of the Gagarin type, they stressed the physical fitness. Muscles, pull-ups and so on. Because they did not know what to look for. And then they found out that physical strenght is not necessary. No, he had to be resilient health-wise. He had to have stamina. When there was a flight in cooperation with the Americans, the cosmonauts talked about their training and they agreed, both Russians and Americans, that it’s not important to be strong, as in, weight lifter strong. No, no, one has to have stamina, grit. That’s the right word, grit. I do stuff and it’s done, full stop. That was the main criterion. And I’m that way. I’m from Moravian Slovakia. It‘s Southern Moravia. And even now, I have grit. And that’s what my wie sometimes complains about, that I’m such an odd character.”
“Vladimír’s flight happened on the 2nd of March and on the 1st of May, we stood on the scaffolding at Letná plain and waved at the workers and youth and everyone who marched across Letná in the First of May parade. What was interesting that apart from us two and some Soviet cosmonauts, there were all the Communist Party leaders.”
“You joined the Party so that you could fly or did you actually support the ideology?”
“How do I answer that… Frankly, if I were not in the Communist Party, I wouldn’t be a pilot. Sure, there were some who were not Party members but they had no future. They couldn’t hold any position of command. Those were just ordinary pilots – soldiers.”
Oldřich Pelčák was born on the 2nd of November in 1943 in Zlín in the family of Oldřich and Eva Pelčák. He was the oldest of four siblings, he spent his childhood with his family in Kyjov. His father worked in the Institute of Rubber and Plastic Material Technology Research in Zlín, his mother worked as an editor for both press and television. Since his childhood, Oldrich was interested in aviation. He graduated from the secondary technical school in UH and in 1962, he was drafted and spent three years in aviation school in Prešov. In 1956, he graduated as a pilot officer. Then he served at the army air bases in Piešťany and Ostrava where he recertified from the Mig 15 fighter jet to Mig 21. In 1967, he settled at the Žatec airport where he got his First Class pilot license. Here, he also met his first wife Hana and they had two children together. In the first half of the 1970’s, he studied at the Gagarin Air Force Academy in Monino along with Vladimír Remek and three other Czechoslovak pilots. In 1976, he and Vladimír Remek were picked in a preliminary selection of cosmonauts for the Interkosmos programme and they departed to the Star City [training centre] in the Soviet Union where they underwent the cosmonaut training along with other candidates from Poland and German Democratic Republic. Two days before the spaceship launch which happened on the 2nd of March in 1978, Oldřich was informed about the decision of the Czechoslovak committee to have Vladimír Remek fly to space. After having returned home, he held various positions of command in the Žatec garrison. The last few years before he retired, he worked as a test pilot for the … in Praha-Kbely, which he considers the best time of his flying career. He retired when he was 55. He was married twice, he has his fourth child from the second marriage.
