Hi everyone,
I am intervening here at the kind request of my friend Thomas Müller (Cheers, Thomas!) who, mislead by my nationality, approached me with the request for insider information on Romania’s supersonic fighter projects. Little did Thomas know that in this little corner of the world one should always expect the exact opposite regardless of what the subject matter might be :-[ .
What I mean in this case is that about a long expired and on top of that fruitless effort (i.e. the work on the IAR-95) there is as good as no information available, but about the current state of defense matters in this country one could easily find out what the fighter jocks will have for lunch tomorrow – err, I suppose THAT qualifies as a defense matter, right!? ;D
Anyway, fact is that there were few (if any!) written records kept from a time of political suppression, when fear was the order of the day. So here we are, knowing nothing about anything, having no memoirs and no [known] archives to turn to. It is in this context that I searched the Internet and stumbled on a blog run by a gentleman who appears to be a Romanian [aeronautical] engineer living for a long time now in Germany:
http://la-neamtu-tiganu.blogspot.ro
“Neamtu’ tiganu’” means as much as “German gipsy” which might have something to do with the fact that the gentleman moved from here to there (gipsies are apparently supposed to do that a lot!?), or perhaps it has even something to do with his surname, “Neamtu” being a not uncommon occurrence as far as Romanian family names are concerned…
On this particular blog there are a couple of entries on the IAR-93, the IAR-99 but also on the IAR-95. Since the blog is written in Romanian, I contacted the author in the comments section of an article mentioning the IAR-99 asking if he has anything on the ’95 written down in German or English. I am the “anonymous” from Bucharest signing as Niki Gheorghe:
IAR 99 La TV, Saturday, December 7, 2013
http://la-neamtu-tiganu.blogspot.ro/2013/12/iar-99-la-tv.html#comment-form
Here’s what the gentleman replied:
neamtu tiganu, December 9, 2013 at 10:57 AM
“[…] This blog is just a hobby of mine as I keep it only for my own pleasure and I have no intention in publishing anything in German or English.
If you care, you can use any material from this blog mentioning [or not] where you got your information from.
Anyway, I would be very glad if more information on Romanian aviation would be made available for anyone interested so, depending on the amount of spare time I have, I’d be willing to help in translating what has already been published on my blog.”
Then he added:
neamtu tiganu, December 11, 2013 at 12:51 PM
“I’d just like to mention that everything I have written so far has been done trying to keep honest, not to add from imagination or to distort facts. However, since memory is such an extremely relative matter, sometimes while engaged in conversation with former colleagues of mine we seem to have different recollections about things we’ve gone through together. Therefore I would advise everyone to be rather skeptical and as far as possible to try and corroborate facts, as they say, from “three different sources”.
So, there you have it. I promised Thomas to go through the material and translate it, even if he didn’t insist on it. He also hinted to this site here and since the author has given his ‘go ahead’, I shall try over the next couple of weeks to provide everyone interested with this man’s recollections (and those of others, as shall be seen). Nothing fancy, just a slice of Cold War memories… over a glass of beer.
Cheers,
Niki