Magyari
Béla

Béla Magyari was born on 8 August 1949 in Kiskunfélegyháza. He went to school in the town, matriculated at the Móra Ferenc Gymnasium, and at fifteen left the ground for the first time in a glider of the local flying club. He was still too young for the examinations and needed his parents' and the authorities' consent. He earned the silver-wreath rating, and it was then that he settled on becoming a pilot.

He learned powered flying in Békéscsaba. In 1967 he was admitted to the Kilián György Aviation Technical College in Szolnok, and from 1970 he trained on supersonic aircraft at the military flying school in Krasnodar. He was commissioned in 1972, graduating with honours. From that year he served as an officer of the 47th Tactical Air Regiment at Pápa, flying MiG-21s, and five years later he earned his first-class fighter pilot rating.

The search for a cosmonaut was announced in 1977. Ninety-five military pilots reported for the medical examinations, and after months of screening two remained: Bertalan Farkas and Béla Magyari.

In March 1978 he moved with his family to Star City near Moscow. Two years followed. Centrifuge runs, weightless flights, winter and summer survival training, and the daily study of the Soyuz spacecraft and the Salyut-6 station. His commander was Vladimir Dzhanibekov, who had already been to orbit.

At the end of the training four men stood ready, and there was one seat. On 26 May 1980 Bertalan Farkas and Valery Kubasov departed, and Magyari watched the launch from mission control. At home he received the same decorations as the crew that flew, and the title Cosmonaut of the Hungarian People's Republic.

In the year after the flight he travelled with Bertalan Farkas to schools, cultural centres and clubs. That kind of work stayed with him. He gave lectures, he wrote, and when a child asked how one becomes a pilot, he explained.

He also kept studying. He graduated from the transport engineering faculty of the Budapest University of Technology, then took a doctorate in Miskolc. His thesis grew out of the materials science experiments of the joint Hungarian and Soviet spaceflight, examining the crystallisation of an aluminium and copper alloy in microgravity. He was promoted lieutenant colonel in 1985 and colonel ten years later, on the fifteenth anniversary of the spaceflight.

In the early nineties he worked at the Ministry of Finance on the accounts of the Soviet troop withdrawal, surveying the condition and future use of the airfields left behind. In 1992 he returned to the Defence Forces, working on the development of the MiG-21, then led the defence group at the Budapest University of Technology. In 1998 he served six months with the NATO-led SFOR: commander of the liaison officers of the Hungarian engineering contingent at Okučani, and head of a survey group in Sarajevo.

He retired from the military in 2001, and in the same year was elected president of the Hungarian Astronautical Society, an office he held for six years. He then joined the Hungarian Space Office. He worked on the country's international space relations, including the preparation of cooperation with the European Space Agency, and represented Hungary in the United Nations work on outer space. In 2006 he retired from there as well.

Schools and universities invited him often. He spoke about the selection, the training and the spaceflight, about what one has to know and to endure along the way. When he was invited, he assembled a temporary travelling exhibition from his own collection. He and his wife raised four children, two of whom became pilots.

He was interested in astronomy and geology. He liked snorkelling and he read a great deal. From time to time he was asked to review technical books.

With his family he lived in Rákoshegy, in the seventeenth district of Budapest, on a quiet street near the railway. He was fond of that green, airy neighbourhood. In an interview he said that from the air he had seen the smog sitting over the heart of the city like a bell jar, and that his children stopped coughing within half a year of the move.

After 1989 he was spoken of less and less in public. In his home town he was not forgotten. He died on 23 April 2018. The Ministry of Defence and the Hungarian Defence Forces counted him among their own dead, he was buried with military honours at the Fiumei Road Cemetery, and was awarded the For the Homeland decoration posthumously. His ashes were scattered from an aircraft above the airfield at Kiskunfélegyháza, where he had first taken off.

The Interkosmos programme prepared pilots from allied countries alongside Soviet crews. The Hungarian pair started work at Star City in the spring of 1978. Bertalan Farkas formed a crew with Valery Kubasov, Béla Magyari with Vladimir Dzhanibekov, and both crews had to complete the same programme.

The decision was taken during 1979, but the Soviet side announced it only in the final days. According to later accounts this was to avoid tension between the two pilots. Only one of them could fly.

By the end of the training all four men were ready. On launch day Magyari was fit to fly, as was expected of a member of the backup crew. When the crew returned from Salyut-6, the men were welcomed home together.

The doubling ran through the public preparations too. The army newspaper had two special editions ready, the Military Film Studio had two films finished, and on the stamp issued by the Hungarian Post two unrecognisable cosmonauts wave before boarding, because the printing had to be done in advance. The versions featuring Béla Magyari stayed in the archive.

A trained cosmonaut is one who completed the training, passed the examinations and was fit to fly. Béla Magyari was such a man, and his country decorated him as though he had been to space.