The first soldiers arrived at the cemetery at noon. Five men from the Mihai Viteazul Guard Regiment 30 in Bucharest wearing khaki and blue protocol uniforms with gilded epaulets and matching caps, crossed the main alley in front of the chapel of Bellu Catholic Cemetery. They passed a wind-torn flag, muffled peasants shouting for justice, and beggars asking for a dime in honor of the heroes. They turned right on a narrow path, past the televisions’ satellite trucks, frozen reporters clinging to their microphones, gravediggers who jostled one another, and strangers crying over someone whom they’d never meet. They surrounded a thick tree, ready to be stifled under hundreds of wreaths, and then they turned north, to look for the cemetery’s administrator.

The coffin got past the gates at 3:00 PM. A man with a green hat yelled, “He should rise from the grave for one last flight, take everyone with him, all politicians and all chiefs of secret services, and he should jump out of the plane with a parachute and leave everyone there.” Hundreds of people that had been waiting in the cold since morning scattered off to the sides of the wide alley, perched on fences, grasping on branches and tree trunks, screaming at each other “Here he comes.” The funeral procession turned right, dragging the mob, who stomped on graves, lighted candles, and crosses. Carnations fell from a helicopter, and the soldiers aligned on the alley in front of the grave fired blank cartridges three times in honor of the deceased reserve officer. They all sang and hummed the Romanian national anthem, and in the end a cold gust of wind dispelled the white frost off the branches and a tiny black bird split the sky in two. One by one, colleagues in uniform, friends, foes, and complete strangers lighted tapers and slowly headed back from where they came, lumbering on frozen alleys. They left behind the sorrow and pain, the blue propeller blade on a pedestal, and one benumbed old woman chanting “You’ve gone too soon, pilot Iovan. Just like a hero.”

* * *

Adrian Iovan died on a Monday, on January 20, 2014 on Petreasa peak in the Apuseni Mountains in Transylvania, over 100 kilometers north of Alba Iulia and around seven kilometers north of Horea commune in Alba County. The nose cone of the light British aircraft Britten-Normal BN-2A-27 Islander that had recently made it through the technical inspection slammed into thin elastic firs. Iovan pulled the yoke until the last moment, keeping its nose up and trying to land the plane on its tail, ripping its wings and sinking its trunk into a young forest covered by snow.

He carried six people on board: surgeons Radu Zamfir (39) from the Fundeni Institute in Bucharest, Valentin Calu (42) from the Elias University Emergency Hospital, Cătălin Pivniceru (46) from Saint Marie Clinic Hospital in Bucharest, and Sorin Ianceu (37) from the Beiuș Municipal Hospital in Bihor County. They were joined by Răzvan Petrescu (23), the copilot and Iovan’s student at the Romanian Aviation Academy, and by sub-lieutenant Aurelia Ion (23), student-officer in her fifth year of study at the Military Medical Institute in Romania’s capital city. The seven people made up one of the many teams that crossed the country hundreds of times a year in races against the clock, struggling to give hope to thousands of patients on the waiting list for an organ transplant.

The phone rang at 10:00 AM. The coordinator of the transplant program in Bihor County, Dr. Carmen Pantiș, called the national coordinator, Victor Zota, telling him that the family of a 64-year old woman agreed to donate her liver, kidney, and cornea. The woman was found unconscious on Friday evening by her daughter and rushed to the Oradea County Clinic Hospital by ambulance. She stopped breathing on her way to the hospital, and doctors informed her children that she could no longer survive surgery. On Sunday, her brain ceased to function and started to liquefy. She would have made it a few more days on life support, but she needed strong medicine to keep her alive, and every living hour degraded her organs and diminished the chances that they would be useful for a future recipient.

Dr. Radu Zamfir selected and coordinated the transplant team. He chose Calu, Pivniceru, and Ianceu who were all taking part in a surgery training program at Fundeni Hospital, and Aurelia Ion, who’d volunteered for different teams several times before. The flight was assigned to Adrian Iovan, Zamfir’s friend and motorcycle race partner, the one who supported him and constantly made fun about his lack of time to grab a bite.

At 10:50 AM, Iovan, captain of the YR-BNP aircraft, a light plane with wide wings that joined over a body almost 11 meters long, submitted an instrumental flight plan to the Romanian Aviation Academy which informed the air space that the pilot would fly at high altitude, not seeing the ground and relying only on flight instruments and tower indications. The maximum altitude that the BNP-2A-27 could reach was around 4,000 meters.

Iovan took part in many successful transplant missions. Doctors appreciated him and enjoyed flying with him. When interviewed, he’d say he felt accomplished and was happy to help the ill to prolong their lives. He was aware that his task was not easy and understood that patients and doctors depended on his piloting skills, but also on good time management and good weather. To pay him back for all the help he’d given to the transplant teams, doctors had allowed him to satisfy his curiosity and let him witness an organ excision. Iovan confessed he hadn’t been that nervous since the birth of his second child and recommended all people who had the tendency of putting their health in danger to witness a transplant at least once in their lives.

All seven took off from Băneasa-Aurel Vlaicu International Airport at 1:38 PM, in the BN-2A-27 plane in which they froze every time they flew. It was 41 degrees outside, a foggy and gloomy day. In the morning, Iovan and his copilot had checked the weather and flight conditions, the airports and the general status of the aircraft. The pilot had arranged the passengers according to their weight. Răzvan Petrescu sat on the left, Adrian Iovan on the right. Pivniceru and Ianceu were seated behind them, Calu sat on the third row behind Pivniceru, and Aura Ion and Radu Zamfir near the tail of the aircraft. They were supposed to arrive in Oradea at 4:10 PM.

The passengers stared out the windows at wide fields and clouds until they reached the Carpathian Mountains. They soon sank into a thick layer of fog and Pivniceru fell asleep. Ice gradually accumulated on the fuselage and the aircraft got heavier with every passing minute. The plane’s wings slowly lost their aerodynamic shape and icing began to hamper the flight.

One hour from takeoff the captain announced to the Romanian Air Traffic Services Administration (ROMATSA) that he will descend to 3,050 meters, although the lowest safe altitude in the area was 3,200. He soon requested another descent to 2,450 meters, announcing that he would not be flying IFR anymore, but VFR (Visual Flight Rules), relying on his senses and leaving the area under ROMATSA’s control.

“Location and altitude,” the air traffic controller in Sibiu asked at around 3:00 PM.

“We’re at 8-0 and 15 miles to Sibiu,” Iovan gasped out. They were flying at 8,000 feet (2,348 meters) and had 24 kilometers left until they reached the Transylvanian city.

“Can you climb to 9-0?” the air traffic controller asked, indicating the desired altitude of 2,743 meters.

“We’ll try.”

A couple of minutes later, the tower requested the altitude of BN-2A-27 again, and the pilot told them they’d climbed to 2,621 meters. Then, at ROMATSA’s request, Iovan announced he was getting ready to descend to about 2,400. Soon after they exited the Sibiu area, the subsequent air traffic controller asked if they could climb higher, but didn’t get an answer.

Iovan was desperately trying to increase the engines’ power while thick sheets of ice were breaking loose off the propeller. The captain was sending out messages, but they were no longer received. Soon after 3:30 PM, ROMATSA requested the aircraft’s location again. Another airplane in the area mediated the discussion and the air traffic controller found out that BN-2A-27 was flying at 2,450 meters. At 3.45, the captain stopped answering the calls.

The passengers began to feel that they were rapidly losing altitude. They saw a mountain peak coming out of the milky mist that the pilot managed to pass and then felt the first slender fir tops that the airplane swept with its belly. Iovan pulled the yoke as hard as he could and tried to bring the plane upwards, avoiding a frontal crash. The aircraft suddenly hit a tree and in a few moments collapsed on the ground, breaking its wings in the plunge. The nose cone sunk in the cushy snow, and the trunk fell on one side. Calu and Pivniceru hurt their heads and lost consciousness. Sorin Ianceu’s two phones were smashed into pieces. Răzvan Petrescu broke his legs in the impact and Aura Ion was thrown on the front seats. Zamfir was protected by his motorcycle jacket, and Iovan hurled against the flight panel. Then it all went quiet.

* * *

Adrian Iovan knew he was going to die. Most aviators sense it. He was 55 years old and he’d spent the last one looking for a blade propeller to place next to his grave. He’d slept with it in the house for six months, and then he’d chosen a photograph from his youth and written a couple of words to go with it worthy of everything he’d thought he’d done so far: “Pilot Adrian Iovan. Reserve Captain Aviator, 1981 graduate from the ‘Aurel Vlaicu’ Aviation Officers Military School. Instructor Pilot Captain AN-2, AN-24, Boeing 737. Flight Chief Instructor at the Romanian Aviation Academy.”

Iovan studied at the “Henri Coandă” Aviation High School in Bucharest and ever since he was an adolescent he took parachuting lessons because he loved to hang from something in the air. Later he wanted more. He wanted to stay in the air and in all the planes he jumped from. There were very few people who gave him a chance in aviation because he came from a modest and fearful family that regarded this profession as something exotic. He didn’t have connections in the field either. But at 20, he joined the ‘Aurel Vlaicu’ Aviation Officers Military School in Boboc, Buzău County, which he graduated ahead of his class and where he met his future friends for life. It was at this school that he first put his hands on the yoke, flying a Romanian IAR 823 plane. Later on, he took lessons to become a flight navigator, a member of the aircrew who used to handle maps and supervise the track, and pilot on BN-2, an English airplane used for short distance transportation.

He spent the first years of his career in utilitarian aviation. He practiced on small planes that he piloted at low altitudes to sprinkle the fields, and made friends with peasants and farmers. He temporarily changed his profession in 1987 when Tarom announced it was looking for navigators for the big Russian Ilyushin IL-18 planes. Then, after the company stopped using that aircraft shortly after the ‘89 Revolution, together with other navigators he joined the team of copilots on Antonov An-24, a smaller Russian plane. Iovan shared responsibilities with the captain. They flew the plane consecutively, one at a time, without the help of sophisticated equipment, making Iovan happy that he got to “feel” how the plane was behaving.

Adrian Iovan was a bold pilot, but he was also calculating, cautious and calm, his colleagues remember. He reported even the smallest technical failures and liked to test his young copilots during flights with all kinds of questions on aviation theory. This is what recommended him that after three years of flying the An-24, since 1994, to move on to bigger, newer airplanes such as the Boeing 737, the most popular passenger plane in the world at the time. He flew the 737 more than 11,000 hours, and dedicated 15 years of his career to it. All his efforts paid him back, and Iovan soon became a famous and respected pilot. He went from being just a gifted young boy eagerly interested in aviation to an envied captain, admired for both his skills and looks. He was a tall man, robust, well dressed, friendly and well spoken. He was the man in uniform who made the check-in clerks sigh, the pilot for whom passengers changed their tickets so they would only fly according to his schedule, the one who always welcomed everyone in person whenever they stepped into his planes, the one who always smiled and joked with every passenger and made their takeoffs and landings memorable. Iovan was friends with Tarom’s general director but also the voice of his colleagues whenever something important had to be said. He was the star of the company and syndicate leader, the smart guy with luck, always in search of attention, constantly planning for a good life.

In private, he was dedicated to his wife Valerica, a discreet woman whom he fell in love with at first sight when he was 23, and to his daughter Irina, the number one fan of his schnitzel sandwiches that daddy made at dusk before she left for school. He spent little time at home because of his varying shift pattern, but enough for his family to not miss him too much. In his spare time, he took care of the house, cooked anything from jam to delicacies, he fixed and dyed things, and he was always curious about how Irina was doing in school and what her friends were like. He also managed a shop, and later a pizza place that he owned in the neighborhood. He enjoyed a naughty joke, nonstop talks about radars and light breaks and a woman’s sweet smile who answered to his flattery.

* * *

Adrian Iovan’s life changed on one of his flights. It was the summer of 2001 and he was welcoming his passengers on board a plane that would take them from Vienna back to Bucharest. One of those passengers was a well-known Romanian fashion designer with golden hair and blue eyes, dressed in white wearing a red and white bandana with chamomile flowers. She held a doll in her arms and sat on the first seat in the airplane. The captain smiled at her and told her she resembled the doll she was carrying. Due to maintenance issues, the takeoff was postponed so the woman had enough time to examine the captain’s dark blue uniform, white shirt with epaulets, silver curled hair, his calm smile and playful eyes. Then the plane gently detached from the ground and about two hours later reached Otopeni airport’s runway. Romanița Ciolcan called a journalist friend whose husband worked in the airport and asked about the name of the captain who brought her home.

Adrian and Romanița met the next morning at her studio, the fashion designer mentions in her book The word that kills (2006). It was the first time she asked out a stranger whose name she hadn’t even heard before, who talked about unknown aviation topics that she didn’t even understand. Before leaving the room, he asked her to kiss him.

Their affair went on for months, behind closed doors. Adrian arranged his schedule so that he could fly with Romanița as often as possible. They broke up, then got back together and never stopped asking themselves if they should give up their previous comfortable lives for a new one together. Adrian was married for 20 years and had a 19-year-old daughter studying in Switzerland who looked up to her parents, while Romanița was courted by men; she loved power and freedom and was one of the richest women in Romania. It took them half a year to accept that their union would also change the lives of everyone around them. Romanița spent months convincing Adrian that her wealth and social status would never come between them and in the end they took the final step and moved in together. Romanița and Adrian never looked happier, their close ones remember, but the rest of the world didn’t think their affair would last.

Their civil union ceremony took place in June 2003 and the religious ceremony in October. “I never imagined I would give up the sweet comfort of independence with no regrets. That I would throw away half of the clothes in my dresser to make room for his uniforms,” Romanița wrote in her book. Their wedding was the social event of the year. They had an elegant party at Snagov Palace, a popular holiday resort near the capital city, preceded by a ceremony at Ghighiu Monastery, one of Romanița’s dearest places. The bride and groom saw every one of their wishes full filed, from the five star menu and string quartet, to the 1,000 candles scattered on the lawn, good music, a golden veil dress and an acrobatics aviation show offered by The Romanian Aeroclub. They spent their honeymoon in the Maldives, they travelled to Dubai and Miami, took a cruise across the Atlantic Ocean and made plans of escaping from the world together to a far exotic land. Back home, they moved to their new home in Primăverii, a luxury neighborhood in Bucharest, whose construction began in the summer they’d first met.

* * *

Sorin Ianceu first saw Radu Zamfir through a hole in the fuselage. Everyone around him was still. His clothes smelled like gasoline and his leg was bleeding. He struggled to distinguish the moans and the scared face of the blue-eyed doctor who’d managed to get out of the plane. When he recovered his senses, he pulled Calu and Pivniceru out of the wreck and Zamfir, who’d only suffered small injuries, dragged them outside on the snow. The blue-eyed doctor took Aurelia into his arms, covered her with a blanket, with his motorcycle jacket and with Ianceu’s jacket. Pivniceru woke up when his phone rang. Calu regained consciousness later, lying on the ground. He’d hurt his ribs and could barely breathe. He thought he was dreaming and didn’t realize everything was real until he heard Radu Zamfir talking on the phone, announcing to the authorities that they had crashed. On the other side of the wreck, Răzvan Petrescu was calling his father, pilot and flight instructor at the Romanian Aviation Academy.

“We crashed,” Petrescu said.

“And who’s moaning next to you?”

“Adi* Iovan.”

The pilot was stuck between big chunks of the fuselage, between the instrument panel and his chair. He screamed for Zamfir to come and rescue him, but the doctor failed to get him out from under the ruins. He advised the pilot to move and ease his way out, but his words did not reach the captain. Zamfir was also watching over the copilot and the young girl who couldn’t feel her legs and arms. Ianceu took care of Calu and Pivniceru who couldn’t move. Every survivor witnessed someone’s pain, ground their teeth and prayed for help. Everyone was powerless.

Radu Zamfir received a phone call from the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations (GIES) and the surgeon told them the airplane had crashed in a mountainous area, somewhere between Scărișoara cave and Beliș commune, in Cluj County, on the right side of a road. He also said that everyone was badly injured. The news spread across officials, the media, and the people who lived in the area. Soon, Raed Arafat, state sub secretary in the Health Ministry who was attending a NATO meeting in Budapest, found out about the incident too. Arafat texted the Brigade General Ion Burlui, chief of the GIES, and called Dorel Grădinaru, chief of the Aviation General Inspectorate in the Interior Ministry. He then contacted Defense minister Mircea Dușa who, according to Arafat, ordered to prepare the Medivac helicopters, but the aircraft couldn’t reach the area because of icing. Another helicopter of the Mobile Service for Emergency and Reanimation (SMURD) left a patient in Mediaș and rushed towards the wreck, but couldn’t find it because of the fog and came back soon after.

Adrian Iovan was begging for someone to help him. Fearing an explosion, he summoned the strength to tell the doctors to step away from the plane and build a fire farther. They kindled a bundle of wet logs and some sheets of paper from Calu’s notebook. The fire soon burned out and the same doctor got his surgical scrubs and sleepers out of his bag, sprinkled them with perfume and threw them on the smoldering fire. Around 8:30 PM, Zamfir told doctor Zota from the National Transplant Agency that he felt he’d die soon and that this might be the last time he could pick up the phone. Iovan went mute in the frozen cockpit.

* * *

It was past 3:00 AM when Adrian Iovan heard Romanița screaming. It was October 6, 2005 and the fashion designer woke up nervous, Romanița wrote in her book. She’d seen a silhouette standing in the bedroom doorway in her Primăverii mansion and barely managed to articulate some words that her sleepy husband didn’t understand. Adrian jumped out of the bed while the shadow rushed down the stairs, smashing two paintings, crossing the living room, and ending its race in the kitchen. Iovan heard the door slam, then saw a slender figure jumping out the kitchen window. He came back in the living room and his wife showed him her handbag untouched, suggesting that the man might not be there to steal. Iovan told Romanița to call the police, but she didn’t manage to get through to them. In the meantime, he took his sporting gun and got out on the terrace at ground level where the guy who threw himself off the window was supposed to have landed. There was no one there and Iovan was frightened. He didn’t understand what the man was looking for, whether he was alone or if he had a gun. He managed to see his fingers clinging to a gas pipe at the edge of the balcony and hit him with the gun. He hit him again, and then the gun unloaded. The man fell down and the house went silent.

The lawsuit between Adrian Iovan and the family of Bogdan Iancu, his victim, dubbed “the Primăverii murder” made the newspapers’ front page for months. It was all over the news and on every tabloid TV show. The Iovans were harassed by paparazzi and journalists stuck in the gutter. Yet Romanița and Adrian didn’t make any statements and tried to protect themselves from the wave of gossip, so as to not interfere with their lawyer’s work. “It was the toughest lawsuit. In every way,” says Cristian Sîrbu, Iovan’s lawyer. “There were some extraordinary judicial battles carried out, in order to change the mentality” because in 2005 a law article inherited from the Communist regime mentioned that self defense was only considered a counter reaction identical with that of the attacker. Meaning “if someone came to kill you with a bat, you couldn’t show up with a chainsaw. You had to look for another bat and measure that bat in order to make sure it was the same size.” The pilot, turned tabloid superstar overnight, knew very well that his chances of being found innocent were slim and packed his bags to go to jail.

Romania divided into two camps, those who supported Adrian Iovan and those who wanted him behind bars because he was presumably a cold blooded murder. The main speaker for the latter was OTV, a television channel owned by current a tabloid mogul Dan Diaconescu. Night after night, Diaconescu fed the hungry audience with witch predictions, interviews with criminals and evidence that Romanița had an intimate affair with Iancu, whom she was presumably waiting for that night at her place. “That’s how Dan Diaconescu made his money,” Sîrbu says, the lawyer who strongly felt the media pressure. “OTV was very important. It was the only scandal television at the time. Everyone was watching it, even if they didn’t admit it. Even the judges. They ended up paying ten times more attention to our judicial proofs while they immediately accepted the other side’s proofs.” During the lawsuit Romanița Iovan suffered a miscarriage and lost the baby she and Adrian found out they’d have just three days before Iancu was shot.

Adrian Iovan and the Iancu spent two years in court and he was found innocent at the end of 2007. His lawyer managed to prove that Iancu had been there to steal and that Iovan killed him out of impulse, fear, not knowing whether the burglar was acting alone or planned to kill them later in the middle of the night in their own home. In the end the pilot had to choose between Iancu’s life and his own. “He hid on a pipe where Iovan couldn’t see him,” Sîrbu says. “He wanted to pull him by the gun and if Iovan were to have fallen, he would have hit his head on the concrete and died. He fired a shot because he was shocked, out of reflex. You grab my gun, what am I supposed to do? Here, take it, shoot me?” Iovan made history becoming the first person to be found innocent in a self-defense homicide case in Romania and the individual who Romanians can thank for the article of law that defined self-defense in the Penal Code.

* * *

Gheorghe Trif had been away from his home in Petreasa village, Horea commune in Alba County, all day. At night, when he came back to his house at about 7:00 PM, his wife told him that she’d seen a plane crash on television, right by the Ursoaia Cabin, 55 kilometers from Cluj. They didn’t know exactly where the survivors were and they said the authorities hadn’t found them yet, although three hours had passed since they hit the ground. Trif called 112, the Romanian emergency number, and they connected him to Dr. Radu Zamfir, who told him they were in a forest covered by a thick blanket of snow. There was only one such place, Trif said to himself, the tallest peak in the area, Petreasa in Gilău Mountains, 1.415 meters high. This was the only peak with snow at that time of the year, a summit that Trif knew very well because he’d spent his childhood on it. The villager called a neighbor, Gheorghe Giurgiu, and asked him to accompany him in his search on the mountain. Giurgiu invited another local, Argentin Todea. All three took an off road car and went looking for survivors, guided by the chief of station in Albac commune, Alba county, and by a forest ranger.

It was dark outside, it drizzled, and a snowstorm was approaching. The three men could barely distinguish the road ahead because of the fog. Their car got stuck after two kilometers and they started climbing the mountain by foot. They screamed as loud as they could because that was the only way they could locate those whom they were looking for. They climbed for three kilometers and then the climb got harder and harder because of the rugged ground. The wind threw snow in their face, they sweat but never stopped moving, nor did they lose hope they’d ever reach the site, and then they started to hear voices. “Can you see us?” a man was shouting, thinking he was delusional. The villagers smelled gasoline and could barely tell a flashlight in the thick mist. A couple meters away from the plane wreck there were three men trembling. They wore frozen thin clothes and held one another tight by a smoldering fire. A man dressed in a thin jumper was kneeing next to a young woman laid on a motorcycle jacket covered with a blanket, trying to resuscitate her by pressing his palms against her chest. Farther away, in front of the wreckage, a sturdy young man was lying on the snow on his back, both his legs broken, screaming: “Don’t leave me!” And last, between white and blue slabs of fuselage, with his head propped against the instrument panel, laid Adrian Iovan, the pilot, with his hand still on the yoke.

The injured could barely speak, and those who did just said they were cold. It was around 9:00 PM and, with no further questions, Trif called his wife and asked her to spread the word to all the villagers in the area to come and help them. Afterwards, the three men decided to help every passenger descend from the mountain, being convinced that if they spent just a few more minutes in the snow they would all perish. First they took Aurelia Ion on a blanket, and Radu Zamfir, the only doctor who could still walk. On their way down, the three villagers struggled to understand and apply the doctor’s indications and started to feel powerless. Soon after, they met more villagers from Horea and two girls from SMURD, police soldiers and firemen, and off road and rescue teams from three counties that were camped at the foot of the mountain. Up on the peak, Giurgiu was placing his own coat under the copilot, and struggled to rekindle the fire.

With the help of other locals, Todea, Trif and Giurgiu improvised a stretcher out of tree branches and another blanket and took turns in descending with the copilot. The remaining doctors reached the off road cars either on their own or carried by a tractor that managed to climb half a kilometer more than the cars. They left Adrian Iovan behind because they couldn’t get him out of the stretch and they removed his body only at midnight, when the rescue teams finished helping everyone injured person descend. They cut the cockpit open, lifted the corpse and laid it on a platform, covered with blue plastic that revealed a naked belly and one pair of slip on shoes. Iovan had spent hours in the cold without a pulse watched over by guards so that wild animals would not devour him.

* * *

After “the Primăverii murder”, Romanița and Adrian’s relationship seemed stronger by the day and despite rumors about their extramarital affairs they always posed as the perfect couple. In 2006, during the lawsuit, Romanița got the news that she and Adrian would have a baby boy, A couple of weeks before giving birth Romanița and an OTV employee named Radu Popa were photographed by the paparazzi in her car, looking like they were kissing. A new hypothesis about the Iovans’ marital problems riled the media up and journalists and photographers chased the pilot nonstop. Eventually, they caught him right when he first saw the scandal magazine with Romanița’s pictures and they started to speculate that Iovan finally had reasons to get a divorce.

Adrian Iovan was hurt, but he never said he wanted to ask Romanița to break up, more so because the photographs weren’t real, close ones say. “This was just a setup put together by that journalist,” Sîrbu says. “If someone’s taking pictures of us kissing good morning he can always say we’ve done way more than that.”

Albert Iovan was born at Filantropia Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital in Bucharest the day Romanița was turning 42, on October 3, 2006. The long awaited child became the light of his parents’ eyes, of two people settled down, now in their forties. But in a few months, Romanița filed for divorce saying she and her husband were no longer communicating and the marriage lacked substance. Romanița kept her last name and Albert Iovan was given into his mother’s custody, while his father was granted the right to visit him anytime he’d want. Divorcing is hard, but only the first time, Adrian Iovan said in court. You get used to it after the second time.

Adrian Iovan moved out of the mansion and started planning for his life alone. He retired in 2009, just when he was celebrating 51 years of age. He knew he’d live a good life with his pension that was almost as high as his salary in Tarom, without risking his life in the clouds every day. To keep his standards of living, he hired a brokerage firm to help him find a job at an airline company. He soon began working for Blue Air, a Romanian low cost company, and started receiving numerous complaints about his undisciplined conduct at work, authorized sources say. Iovan supposedly hit a copilot in the cockpit, refused to take off or took off before the cabin crew checked every passenger and fastened their seatbelts. Blue Air refused to confirm or deny these accusations “out of respect for someone who is not among us anymore.” It’s true that Iovan still liked to fly, close ones say, but he should have just stayed home and enjoyed his pension.

In 2010, a government decision shook the Romanian aviation world. The Emil Boc administration decided to cut all special pensions and implement a unitary pension system for state employees, with no extra benefits for any type of previous work, qualification, or experience. The decision affected every retired employee who enjoyed a higher income than the average, including flight crews. Adrian Iovan told reporters that after the cuts he barely got approximately $500 a month, 85% less than what he was used to receiving. With this small income he had to cover rent for the Otopeni mansion where he’d recently moved, pay the installments for the car that he drove and cover Albert’s alimony of around $630. Frustrated with the government’s measure, he went to every television station and took part in any TV show to tell the world about his pension. He also told people Blue Air had stopped paying him and he desperately needed to recover the approx. $14.300 that they owned him. Blue Air replied that the brokerage firm through which he’d been hired in the first place should pay him. Iovan was visibly aged and tired and started to gain weight. He was annoyed that people were dragging him from one place to another showing him no way out of his problems. He threatened that if the situation wouldn’t come to a fair solution he’d go on a hunger strike. Romanița no longer asked for Albert’s alimony and the media speculated that she was also helping Adrian with money. Iovan refused to look for work abroad because he didn’t want to stay away from his child. He also knew that any job he’d get wouldn’t last long because he’d reached the retirement age and the medical checkups were harder and harder to pass.

After his contract with Blue Air came to an end, Iovan started to teach at the Romanian Aviation Academy in Bucharest because he wanted to continue to be a good example for Albert. He helped young men and women pilot small planes and he was soon named chief instructor. But authorized sources say he made serious mistakes when flying and broke the rules on many occasions. He sometimes ignored the lowest safe altitude restrictions, forced planes way past their capacity, and almost always pushed the boundaries of safety.

People continued to gossip about Iovan’s love life and his presumed unfaithfulness to Romanița. They said he liked to flirt, that he was sometimes pushy with his female colleagues even though they didn’t make a pass at him and that most of the time he was the only source of all these rumors, yearning public attention. His last known relationship was with a woman named Mihaela Steriu, a doctor at the Filantropia Hospital who witnessed Albert Iovan being born.

* * *

Radu Zamfir arrived at the Cluj-Napoca Emergency Clinic County Hospital around 3:00 AM. He’d only suffered superficial wounds, he was conscious and able to walk and couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky he was to be alive. The other doctors had multiple fractures and traumas and experienced a lot of pain, while the copilot was at the brink of paralysis. Zamfir soon departed back to Bucharest, while Calu, Pivniceru, Ianceu, and Petrescu remained hospitalized, all sharing the same room.

Adrian Iovan was brought down from the mountain in the morning and taken to the same coroner office in Alba Iulia where Aura Ion had arrived the night before. He left for Bucharest four days after the accident and spent five hours on the road. His daughter Irina who’d taken the first flight from France on Tuesday had claimed his body. She had measured him and bought him a brown lustrous coffin. She’d chosen the flowers and the suit he‘d be buried in and ordered the black hearse that brought him back to the capital city overnight. Iovan was laid in the aviation academy’s lobby at dusk and the backyard soon filled with TV satellite trucks and angry powerless aviators. On the other side of the city, thousands of Romanians said good-bye to now colonel Aura Ion, in a military funeral.

One week after the plane crash, every newspaper, magazine or TV show in Romania still presented details about how the authorities had managed the rescue operations. People kept wondering why was it that three villagers with just their flashlights reached the survivors first and not all those teams sent to locate and help the injured with the necessary equipment. Questions arose about why Iovan and Aura had died: Was it because of the cold? Could they have been saved if someone had gotten to the wreck sooner? The official cause of Aura Ion’s death was “prolonged exposure to cold weather,” Mariana Ciucă, her sister, said. The pilot suffered a traumatic shock combined with hypothermia, Irina Iovan says. He had “a broken leg, three broken ribs on one side, four on the other side, traumatic brain injury and a small liver injury. None of them causes a person’s death, not even all of them combined. And when I asked what would have happened if the plane had crashed in the hospital’s back yard, everyone at the morgue went silent.”

According to the doctors’ testimonials, Radu Zamfir gave the 112 emergency number the names of the communes next to the crash site, the towns nearby and the exact location showed in Google Maps application on his phone. The Special Telecommunications Service (STS) that’s in charge of centralizing all calls to 112 says Zamfir sent only the date displayed on his home screen and actually refused to further cooperate and give the dispatcher the correct location because he said he’d already done so. STS also says it doesn’t possess the means to precisely locate the calls made from a mobile carrier, an explanation backed by president Traian Băsescu himself.

Many high-level officials either resigned or were dismissed after the plane crash. Among them, the Internal Affair minister Radu Stroe, ROMATSA’s CEO Aleodor Frâncu and its operations manager Bogdan Donciu, the secretary of state in the Internal Affairs Ministry Constantin Chiper, and the chief of the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations Ion Burlui. Threatened with losing their jobs were the ministry of Transport Ramona Mănescu and the chief of STS Marcel Opriș.

Investigators soon found the wire antenna of the ELT* plane device broken in half, a device that should have helped locate the YR-BNP aircraft. The exact moment when it had broken could not be established, says a report of the Civil Aviation Safety Investigation and Analysis Center (CIAS). The device did manage to send an emergency signal to one of the aircrafts flying above the crash site and the pilots immediately reported it. In the eyes of the public, ROMATSA was guilty for its lack of reaction and because it failed to identify the location of the wreck, a hypothesis also supported by the Romanian Government.

The field teams, including the three locals, complained that the authorities in Bucharest misguided them, created a mess which confused everyone and eventually delayed the rescuers from getting to the crash site. The investigation about how the state institutions acted in this emergency situation is carried out in parallel with the aviation investigation that will explain the reasons why the airplane crashed. 30 days after the accident, CIAS said that most likely the “unfavorable weather conditions during the flight” were an important factor that led to the plane’s crash. The decision of flying in such conditions belonged to Captain Adrian Iovan who was obliged to check the weather data and correlate it with the technical specifications of the aircraft. According to the CIAS report released on February 21 of that year, the plane had a valid airworthiness certificate, thus from a technical standpoint papers showed that YR-BNP could fly safely.

For one week straight, most TV channels dedicated entire news and entertainment programs to the “the hero in the Apuseni Mountains” who saved five lives. Many aviators praised on screen his last maneuver calling it “emergency landing in the woods.” The doctors on board and the three villagers were also called “heroes” and TV producers tried everything possible to have them on their sets. In the meantime, journalists dug up their extramarital affairs and their seemingly dirty business. Public personas who accused Iovan of murder in the past, now bragged about his pilot skills and his moral integrity. In just seven days, Iovan went from being a thief killer and Romanița’s ex husband to the aviator defeated by a system who forced him to get back at the yoke because of an insignificant pension. He was now the pilot who flew even when the conditions were not favorable and risked his life to make a few extra dollars, although his financial situation was not even remotely as bad as people described, Irina Iovan says. (In the last years of his life he’d even given up his pension in favor of two prestigious jobs, for the one at the aviation academy and for a consultant position at ROMATSA.) The National Association of War Veterans in Romania granted the pilot the “Great Romanian Patriot Diploma” for “the way he sacrificed himself, for this act of humanity of saving the ill,” says Marian Dragnea, president of the association, and regardless of the results of the aviation experts’ investigation “he is and will remain a hero and cannot be found guilty of anything. The only people to blame are those who didn’t get to him on time.”

Many aviators refused to be interviewed or quoted in this story because they feared the media’s reaction against any hypothesis that might incriminate the captain. They all mentioned what had happened to the vice dean of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering Octav Thor Pleter, who’d been ridiculed in TV shows after stating that “the pilot carries the entire fault of the crash itself” because he planned and carried out a flight in “severe frost weather conditions that were obvious by just reading the forecast that he had access to before takeoff.” Pleter explained that the BN-2A-27 “doesn’t have the necessary climbing specifications,” that the piston engine with carburetor is “especially vulnerable to this weather phenomenon” of icing and that “the captain had the obligation to know this and correlate the weather data with the aircraft’s limits.”

Dr. Radu Zamfir came back to work two weeks after the accident. He’d been the least injured thanks to the motorcycle jacket he was wearing that day and he soon returned to the hospital and to the organ recovery surgeries, performing his first operation on January 31 in Sibiu. Sorin Ianceu, Cătălin Pivniceru and Valentin Calu returned home after many days of intensive care. All four are determined to carry on with their work as transplant surgeons, although their efforts are not yet repaid. All doctors working for the National Transplant Agency travel against the clock on planes rented from the aviation academy, on regular flights negotiated with Tarom, on the one SMURD plane or even with ambulances when the interventions are close by. They think their contribution is a privilege and they all work out of pure passion, out of desire to learn more and later develop a system that will allow Romania to maintain its leading position in Europe’s donor growth rate ranking, more so because in absolute figure the country is still struggling at the bottom, Radu Deac, executive director of the ANT, says.

Trif, Todea and Giurgiu were named Honor citizens of Cluj County and Cristan Sîrbu, Iovan’s lawyer, promised Giurgiu he’d help him find a job. Răzvan Petrescu went through three surgeries and is still recovering. His father thinks this experience made him more cautious and that the death of his mentor Adrian Iovan, although a great loss, most likely won’t stop him from flying again. Aura Ion’s family still wishes to know if their daughter died on her feet and if those guilty of this tragedy are paying the high price. Ianceu, Pivniceru, Calu and Zamfir say that as soon as they are completely recovered, they’ll go visit the villagers to thank them in person and from now on, on January 20 they’ll celebrate their second birthday.

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On Tuesday morning, one day after a small plane crashed in the Apuseni Mountains, a seven year old with sky blue eyes tried calling his father.