Mathias Rust: German teenager who flew to Red Square

In 1987 a West German teenager shocked the world, by flying through Soviet air defences to land a Cessna aeroplane in Red Square. He was jailed for more than a year - but a quarter of a century later, he has no regrets.

Exactly 25 years ago, the USSR Foreign Ministry announced that it had rejected an appeal by a German teenager against his prison sentence.
Mathias Rust, just 19, had single-handedly flown more than 500 miles (750km) through every Soviet defensive shield in a single-engine plane to land at the gates of the Kremlin.
The idea had come to him a year earlier while he was watching TV at his parents' home where he lived in Hamburg, West Germany.
A summit between the US and Russian presidents in Reykjavik had ended in a stalemate, and the teenager who had a passion for politics felt he wanted to do something to make a difference.

Rust was sentenced to four years in a labour camp

"I thought every human on this planet is responsible for some progress and I was looking for an opportunity to take my share in it," he says.
Rust already had a pilot's licence and had clocked up 50 hours in the air when it occurred to him to put his skill to use.
"I was thinking I could use the aircraft to build an imaginary bridge between West and East to show that a lot of people in Europe wanted to improve relations between our worlds."
Many idealistic teenagers may have had similar fantasies of bringing about