Czech World WarII pilot Frantisek Perina

Prague, CZECH REPUBLIC: Czech World WarII pilot Frantisek Perina meets journalists 05 April 2006 in Prague after receiving from the Czech military, on the occasion of his 95th birthday, a model of the Spitfire with which he downed several enemy planes during the Battle of England. Perina, one of the last living Czech WWII pilots, fled Bohemia in June 1939, one day after he got married. He first participated in the air fighting for France where he downed four planes. After Paris fell, he fled across Gibraltar to England. He downed minimally 12 German planes flying Hurricane and Spitfire planes in 1940-42. His wife was kept in Nazi prisons for the whole of the war. Perina was dismissed from the Czechoslovak military in 1949, one year after the communists seized power in the country. He succeeded in flying to the U.S. zone in Austria. He later emigrated to Canada and then the United States where he participated among others in designing seats for the U.S. outer space programme Gemini and for Boeing 747. AFP PHOTO MICHAL CIZEK (Photo credit should read MICHAL CIZEK/AFP via Getty Images)