People of Polish Aviation - Jerzy Makula

The seven-time world champion in glider aerobatics and top PLL LOT pilot is retiring. 2017 will be Jerzy Makula's last appearance in international competition. He will continue to fly, it goes without saying, but primarily for pleasure at air shows. He has created his own aviation group, wants to give those who have an uphill battle in life a chance to fly, and plans to promote aviation history. These are plans for the coming months. If there is enough time, a book will also be written, in which we will read about the highlights of Captain Makula's life.

Agata Król: When, in July, hundreds of thousands of people looked up looking out for the plane with Pope Francis on board, they also looked at you, because you were the captain of that flight. What kind of emotions were those?

Jerzy Makula: For me an unprecedented thing, a man extremely warm, very pleasant to talk to... I do not know if you can say about the Pope that he is nice? I'm short of words, but everything that is best was equated by the Holy Father. On top of all this, the pride that I was the one who flew the plane... this for a while, at least at the beginning, sort of paralyzed me. To my crew I also had to make one thing clear - remember that this is the Holy Father, but think first of all that we have a normal, such an everyday flight ahead of us, in which nothing will happen and in which we will be ready for anything. We didn't forget, we did everything, it worked out great, it worked out fantastic. For me, one of the greatest experiences.

The excitement, and certainly the impression from the ground, would have been even greater if you had been escorted by fighters. That was the plan, but nevertheless unrealized.

Our plans were thwarted by the weather. As for the idea, I had no doubts. I have very extensive experience in team flying, so it wouldn't be the kind of flight that would cause any danger in my opinion. The fighter pilots would have had a more difficult task, but at the level we're talking about, I'm sure everything would have worked out and we would all have had excellent pictures.

Pope Francis was rather keen on a modest welcome.

The idea was to sympathize with the Holy Father and show the bond.

Did the Holy Father talk to you, what was your meeting like?

Since we had a crew of 3 we were able to approach the Holy Father for a minute and have a private audience. We took fantastic photos and exchanged a few words. It didn't matter what language the Pope was communicating in. He blessed us and simply let us know that he knows that we are the very people on whom the flight and its safety depends. These are cool moments. On the other hand, one of the nicest things happened after landing, when we turned off the engines and were busy rotating the plane, Pope Francis came into the cabin and thanked us. Especially for making the rounds over Krakow and over the place where the young people were camping and where Mass was being celebrated. The idea turned out to be a hit. We coordinated it with the air traffic, which made it possible for us without any problems. Anyway, everyone at the time was fascinated that it was the Holy Father flying with us.

How is such a flight different from others?

Technically nothing, while one of the crew members was responsible for receiving all reports and good wishes from the countries through which we flew and conveying them to the Pope. In turn, the Holy Father, in a very natural way, by the way protocol requires, responded to the heads of state and sent blessings and best wishes through us.

Have you often had the opportunity to host VIPs on board?

Once they suspected that I flew Air Force One, which was obvious nonsense and untrue, while I had the honor of flying with the Speaker of the Senate, I flew with the President several times - I think a unique thing and I felt very honored.

How did you feel honored to bring the first Dreamliner to Poland? The first flight of this machine in the colors of LOT Polish Airlines belonged to you.

Makula is a story that has become part of the pages of the sport of glider aviation, and it was while I was already working in the airline that I became the World Champion for the first time. I say this because the best pilots were delegated to this flight. Please do not forget all my crew - there was Marian Wieczorek, Krzysztof Lenartowicz - we were all World Champions. There was Jarek Zimmer, a very experienced instructor. The idea was just to carry to the world that it was non-accidental people who sat at the helm of the first Dreamliner. We were not randomly selected for this. We were the ones who learned in flight school, we were the first instructors on a Dreamliner in Europe at the time, so that was a huge honor and distinction for us. But at the same time, I think this is how it should be in the future as well. Such pilots should just be given opportunities, and new pilots are already growing who will take on such tasks.

You are sitting at the controls of the Dreamliner, this will be your first time piloting it... What prevails, the focus or the joy of the child?

There was joy and pride, while we felt a great responsibility, because this aircraft at the beginning no one knew. When we got into it, it smelled of paint, new, it had just come out of the factory, so in addition to the fact that we had trained and felt confident, there was anxiety. We wanted to do the job as well as possible. I think this kind of prudence and reasonableness meant that there wasn't this relaxation and enjoyment that we got a toy. I associate this experience with a feeling of tremendous responsibility. Only later, when we had flown on this plane a lot, did we begin to enjoy it. We appreciated the fact that it was so good, that it was new, that we were the ones introducing it... and only then did we begin to "play" with it in the sense that it provided us with a lot of satisfaction.

Compared to other aircraft - a limousine?

It is the largest aircraft in Poland and the most modern in the world. For me, flying it is a great achievement at the end of my career. An achievement that you don't forget and that causes a lot of unique sensations. Comparing the Dreamliner to anything else is difficult. It is an airplane in which the designers have thought about the pilot, and that he performs certain actions - as a result, each subsequent action follows from the one we did a moment ago. Everything is arranged in such a way that flying the plane is satisfying. In addition, the construction of the plane is plastic, so the wings are very soft, for example, in turbulence, when, in addition, the computer guides the machine, it is felt very little. I say then that the aircraft is well sprung.

You mentioned the end of your career, and a year ago you won the world vice-championship in glider aerobatics. So is there this desire to compete in you all the time?

Yes, I think it's nature - that's how we were created, that we are always competing. This year I'm planning only one start, and it will be my last in competition. I plan to participate in the World Games in Wroclaw in July. There are non-Olympic disciplines, plus three aerial disciplines, including glider aerobatics. In the ranking I was in a good place, only 12 pilots of the world are competing. On the other hand, I will spend the World Championships in Torun on the ground, that's what I plan to do. I will be the sports director, so I will go to the other side of the power. I think it's the right time to take care of something else already, because the World Championship is not won indefinitely.

Going back to the early days - did little Jurek listen to his uncle's aviation stories?

I always listened and dreamed. Those were the days when I went to elementary school. I remember such a reading that a bird landed in a meadow, someone suspected it and dreamed of flying. It was the early 1960s and the exact moment when Edek Makula, my uncle, was winning the World Gliding Championship in Argentina. We didn't realize that Makula had become World Champion, but we lived through what the circumstances were. It was an adventure! Uncle flew through the kind of terrain where landing would have threatened disaster, and he certainly wouldn't have made it out alive. Any glider pilot who is capable of overcoming certain barriers must believe that he is the best. But these people, among whom was Edek Makula, were on the verge of a kind of fanaticism... in addition, of course, to their love of flying. They took risks, which, however, were thought out and calculated beforehand. There were not many like that in the world. At the time when Makula was winning, there were only two such crazies - American Johnson and Edek Makula. Anyway, both of them flew the farthest at that time. Such young people like me dreamed, without realizing what flying was... they dreamed of a kind of adventure that those pilots were experiencing.

Is that where the interest in modeling came from?

Yes, it was that very time that caused me to take up aviation modeling when I was trying to make what I dreamed of a reality.

And then came the first successes and a reward that made a difference in the whole life.

I competed in a very local model glider competition. That glider I made then flew quite correctly and quite far. I then got the chance, as a little boy, to fly in the passenger seat of a large aircraft. That big plane was an AN-2, and I experienced it unbelievably. I was entranced! I think that's the right word. I thought to myself then that this is what I would really like to do in life. As I got on that plane and we took that 10-minute flight around our city, I felt something I had never experienced before. On the ground I was riding my bike, driving my car left, right... and there was this space, above us very unreachable, below us. That's how I felt it.

Coming from Silesia, this is a place you associate with working underground, not above ground. Especially since you went to the Mining Technical School.

I worked underground. I spent a whole year at the bottom, driving to the mine every day. I was in charge of some of the transportation to the mine faces, where the coal is mined. Transportation is one of the most important things, because in order to mine coal, you need the right amount of air, water, materials to construct the lining, the vaults in the pit and the entire hydraulic systems that support the passage. I had to be in very many places in one day, which meant a lot of walking in difficult conditions. It wasn't easy, but it gave me satisfaction, because being down in the mine is a challenge. I can appreciate hard work and have a lot of respect for the people who work there.

Then this need to be above ground, or even above it, became greater?

I was graduating from the Mining Technical School and I knew I wouldn't last long at the mine. I was absolutely focused on flying and spent every free moment at the airport. These were my beginnings in glider flying, and soon the first results came.

The first solo glider flight, turned out to be a baptism of fire for you. The winch cable broke and you were left alone with the problem.

I learned to fly behind a winch, on a Heron glider. When you take off in this way, the glider ascends very steeply and there is a moment when the rope is very taut during vertical ascent. In my first solo flight, when the instructor decided I was ready, the rope snapped. The glider very low to the ground was configured so that I was at an angle of about 40 degrees to the top, and it was virtually impossible to know what to do about it. One thing was certain, if nothing was done, he would fall most simply, sliding backwards, and the ground was close. It was then that I felt for the first time that it was I, myself, who had to make a split-second decision. I reacted appropriately. Only then did I understand how it all works, I landed correctly, even though I had problems with it before. It was the first time I felt such emotions and understood that I think I can do it. That was the breakthrough from which I began to see that the ground was a meter or two or ten. This taught me confidence, because this speed of decision-making guaranteed that I would also be able to make a decision in the future.

Did you have later, already as a pilot of cruise planes, sub-optimal situations?

I wish no one, I have not had such situations, except for one, which was not the result of a malfunction, but a hijacking. I survived the last hijacking in LOT. It was the end of 1982, I was flying from Wroclaw to Warsaw. Shortly after takeoff, a bodyguard entered the cockpit, because at that time we carried armed bodyguards on board. I knew his gun was real, so he forced us to land at Berlin-Tempelhof. It was an experience at the time, because along the way we were forced to land by fighter jets, first ours, then German, i.e. East German, and I had no way to signal what was happening. After several such warnings, we could have been shot down. Tempelhof was the border of two systems, and it should be remembered that it was very closely guarded. Shortly after landing, there was a shootout. One of the security guards in the luggage compartment fired at the one near us in the front, except that we had already let him go so that he would be off the plane as soon as possible. The passengers didn't know, and I had a set on board, so 52 people.

You found yourself in communications aviation thanks to your uncle, who suggested it, and you accepted the challenge.

Yes, I was convinced by my uncle. At that time he was already flying long-haul aircraft with an Il-62. I wasn't really interested, but he told me a thing that got to me - Jurek, after all, I flew in sanitary aviation, I flew everywhere, but aviation is also about not flying from place A to place B, because it is indeed boring, but to play out a real long flight. Back then, on transatlantic flights, they flew Il-62s, which had a short range, were very heavy, needed a lot of fuel, and back then, calculating all these things and analyzing the flight on the fly was a huge challenge. My uncle at the time compared it this way - it takes two weeks to sail a Batory to America, and about 9h by plane. This is a challenge and people expect it, and we pilots have to meet such challenges. He kept repeating to me that this is real aviation, not carriage driving - at the time it was said of communications aviation that it was carriage driving - and these short flights have to be too, because everything has to work together - the big plane will bring people to the airport, but the small ones have to whisk them away to a few other places. In the airlines I went through all the rungs, the career path is a very important thing, it gave me enormous satisfaction.

And the Makula name hidden in the MDM name on aerobatic gliders, still gives you satisfaction? How did it come about that you and your colleagues started devising the design of an aerobatic glider? Thanks to you, Poland has been number one in this field for years.

We had such a Polish aerobatic design Kobuz 3 - it was unique in the world. The glider unfortunately had an accident in 1989, during the World Championships, in which our colleague died. Then it was time to come up with something, and we knew what we expected from an aerobatic glider. We had excellent people at the Glider Works who had ideas. We believed in it and found the means to build a new glider. I managed to convince everyone around me that this glider would be the only one, that it would be the best, and that we would make it. The Swift was created, which to date is the only single-seat glider. It was constructed by Edek Marganski, a crazy person in general, who has inexhaustible ideas all the time. Swift was made by a Swiss-English company, where we got involved, did everything. However, the time came that we wanted to do something entirely our own. We created the MDM company, or Marganski-Dunowska-Makula, where each of these letters had a role to play. I knew what I wanted, what kind of glider I wanted, that it should be a two-seater; someone helped us finance it; someone constructed it; and I promoted it in addition to that. This glider is so far the only one on which you can both teach aerobatics and compete. I also slightly modified it, hiding the landing gear where the passenger sits, and I have the world's only MDM Solo Fox design - solo, because it is a single-seater. I am proud of this, because when we come to the World Championships, all the gliders on which the competitors compete are Polish MDM Fox.

And one's childhood modeling skills came in handy....

Modeling skills in the construction of some basic principles regarding aerodynamics or construction came in handy, although these days there are technologies that were not even dreamed of back then.

You started with gliders, you fly the largest cruise plane in Poland, along the way there were aerobatic flights and a desire to fly helicopters....

And how do you know that I wanted to fly a helicopter?

And did you want to?

I wanted to fly a helicopter... But once upon a time... Yes! Well, of course I did - I dreamed of sanitary aviation, and here actually the number one is a helicopter, so that definitely happened to me. But I didn't fly in the end. On the other hand, I was lucky enough to pilot almost all the small and smaller aircraft that fly in Poland.

You will close a certain stage this year, but open another one. What are your plans?

A year ago we created the Makula Aerobatic Team. This is a group that flies brilliantly, these pilots are already instructors. We also have girls flying with us, who are definitely more media-savvy than Makula (laughs). We are trying to create something of our own - this something is Lot Classic, which is a project that, on the one hand, aims to promote the history of aviation, but on the other hand - we want to help people who didn't even dream they could fly, but dreamed of it. We also want to make our presence felt at air shows through the Makula Aerobatic Team. All my sons are flying, we are starting to function very well and this is our direction. Now, when I have more time, I will be able to devote myself to this.

Text: Agata Król.
Archive of JB Investments Sp. z o.o. (all rights reserved)
Photos are from the private archive of Jerzy Makula.