E verything started with great-grand- father Miloš, who was a pilot, and a military one at that, and whose love for planes was passed to Slobodan, his son, then to his grandson, Branislav, and en nally to great-grandfather’s namesake – little Miloš, who already has his captain’s hat and is waiting to grow up just so he can sit in the cockpit like his forefathers. And granddad Slobodan spent as long as 37 years, from 1969 to 2002, at Air Ser- bia, or rather its predecessor companies. Everything started for him as early as pri- mary school, when he made model planes from chipboard. He lied to his mother and went o to learn to y a glider, which was an experience he’d never forget... “The rst time I took ight was more than 50 years ago, at 6.04am. I was alone, the clouds were bathed in the rising sun, and I cried from happiness and the beau- ty. As circumstances would have it, I later trained to become a motor pilot, became the manager of the aero club, gained expe- rience as a skydiver and quickly advanced, but I always dreamt of becoming a military aviation pilot. I loved to y, but to lead a bat- tle up there above the clouds, that was a dream,” we are told by Slobodan, who en- rolled in the pilots school as one of the 30 accepted students; as many as 1,300 had applied. He completed the school and paid him- self for all further training, enriching his pi- lot’s license. He started ying a piston plane for 52 passengers, completed co-pilot train- ing, and in less than two years became a captain. “We kept out of the way so the pas- sengers wouldn’t see how young we are, so they wouldn’t by scared that they were being own by kids [laughs]. And for me it was fascinating to y from one end of the world to the other, to take o in the dark and land in the dark. I was only 35 when I sat at the controls of the largest aircraft in the world, the DC 10, and I did the job so well that I soon also became an instructor, and it was from that position that I retired,” recalls Slobodan. Asked what ying means to him, he says with adoration that still lasts – hap- piness, beauty, satisfaction, sublimity, but also the feeling that you’re di erent from others, that you have to react faster and better, always in every situation, in every second that’s demanded of you. “When you y, you acquire some spe- cial senses that an ordinary man doesn’t have; you notice some things... a pilot’s li- cense is only valid for six months and you are constantly being checked... If I were to be born again, I would again be a pilot, even if only on a small plane that sprays mosqui-
Pradeda Miloš (gore levo), deda Slobodan na krilu aviona 522 i mali Miloš Grandfather Miloš (above
to the left), grandfather
Slobodan on the wing of 522, and little Miloš
come a pilot, and when he becomes a pi- lot”.That’s how I went o to learn to y,”says Branislav, who has been infected with a love for ying since he was little, having circled the entire globe with his father. However, it was a feeling that he had on one rather unpleasant ight that forti ed his convic- tion that he was born to be a pilot. “It was a Singapore-Sydney ight and I’ll never forget it. I was sitting in the cock- pit, because that was then possible, and the copilot had the controls. We suddenly entered literal darkness, there was an in- credible storm, everything was shaking and banging around, we had to land, the lights lit up, dad took over the controls and land- ed the plane. I was then 12 years old and everyone in myplace would have said‘thank God that we survived’, while I thought ‘I’d like to experience this again’,”says Branislav, who has been with the airline since 2002 and a captain on Airbus aircraft since 2015. When you hear such stories and feel such passion, it’s no wonder that another de- scendant of the Jevđevićs wants to y.
toes, concludes granddad Slobodan, who enjoys his well-deserved retirement, but also the fact that his son Branislav has fol- lowed in his footsteps, and that his grand- son is preparing to do likewise… It’s no wonder that Branislav started ying like his father given that he spent so much time in the cockpit as a boy and toured almost the whole world. Also like his father, he told his mother a little lie... “Everything started for me in 1991, at the Academy in Vršac, when I’d just turned 16. I got my rst sports pilot license two years later and completed the academy in 1997. When I wanted to enrol in the school, I didn’t have enough money and I told my mum that we would go on holiday, when I was in fact trying to sell my motorbike and collect the 3,000 Deutschmarks that it cost at the time. When my father, who was then in Brazil, heard what was happening, he decided to give me the money that I was lacking. I remember the sentence he said to my mum: “one becomes a pilot twice in life - when a man makes a decision to be-
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