Ing. Milan Koutný

* 1969

  • "There were more situations where it was dangerous. Or when it seems dangerous because you never know what will happen. How many times we had to sit with minimal fuel left because one has to reckon with the high temperatures. By the fact that the temperatures were high and you have a full machine of equipment, in the Republic you take 22 people in a helicopter without any problems, but there we were taking maybe only ten people, or even five people, and we had to decide what to leave on the ground from the equipment so that we had it mass-calculated and were able to make the flight. We were taking little fuel to just have it there and back, there wasn't any great manoeuvring room. There were situations that were potentially dangerous, they were on the edge, but never over the edge. Like in a car, if you say, I'm still going on the orange light." - "Can you say at some points how is flying different than in the Czech Republic?" - "It's the altitude. The airport in Prerov is 200 meters above sea level, there it was 2,225 meters, that's the first thing, to this climate, the weather, the decisive factor: high temperature, dust, and on top of that some Taliban people who might shoot at you. The machine was constantly at maximum take-off weight, every kilo was counted, clothes included. In the Czech Republic we didn't use tactical vests, here you have plates in your vest, you have an emergency radio, you have that gear in there, you have some medical supplies, fleeces, so the vest is 15-18 kilos, so it's harder to move around in that."

  • "The Americans had offices across the hall, and I remember they didn't have a television. We had a television or satellite there at the head of the national delegation and we watched the news when we needed to or whatever to keep us informed, even though we were getting briefings from various sources. I know I was somewhere off the premises, and when I came back, the Americans were in the office of the head of the national delegation. I wondered what was going on, why everybody was crammed in there, so many people. And then I saw a transport plane crashed into the towers there. I wondered what kind of film they were watching, so I asked them, and you could see they were all absolutely terrified. And so they told me that there were these terrorist attacks, and the whole world was changed by that." - "How did they react at that point?" - "They were certainly devastated because no one expected that so many planes had been hijacked, could be directed somewhere without anyone noticing. Then travel changed, and that's not taking Covid into account. The checks, everything just, got tighter. Then it started to become a thing that we all had cars, too, that we either bought there or brought in from the Republic, and everybody who worked at AFCENT, later AFNOR, had the first two letters AF. Which actually, wherever you were, everybody knew who you were. We lived in blissful ignorance that anyone could identify us at any time. So they started changing the tags for random numbers and there were more of those things, they tightened up the access to the headquarters, they checked everything, they started building more defenses and protection mechanisms, so there was a lot of that."

  • "In the first year, there were some communist slogans everywhere, communism was here, the ideology was here, but nobody told us anything... That came later, they started offering us to join the party, to consider it, not to consider it, and so on. Of course I didn't want to join the party. Well, before it could roll over on us, the revolution came, which caught us at the university, and everything was different." - "What was the revolution like in Košice?" - "In Košice, in the east of the republic, we already said that whoever went through the Kysacky tunnel, that there was already Asia, but I don't want to offend the Slovaks... What was in Prague didn't appear in Košice until a few days later. We were even in a pub in Košice on Saturday, when there was a strike in Prague, and nobody knew about any revolution. Moreover, the television and other media were still subdued at that time. So we didn't find out until the next week and then the situation developed because nobody knew what was going to happen, what was going to happen next. What was going to happen with the school, there were a lot of subjects like Marxism-Leninism, they were eventually cancelled and we didn't even have a state exam on it, as the original plan was that we should have an exam on Marxism-Leninism."

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    Pardubice, 06.05.2021

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Czech airmen in Afghanistan went all the way

Milan Koutný, helicopter pilot
Milan Koutný, helicopter pilot
zdroj: archive of a witness

Milan Koutný was inspired to pursue a career in aviation by the fate of Arnošt Valenta, a radiotelegraphist with the 311th Czechoslovak Bomber Squadron in Great Britain during World War II, who was shot by the Gestapo after escaping from a prison camp. He came from the same village, was born on 2 May 1969 in Zábřeh in Moravia and grew up in Svébohov in the Šumperk region. After graduating from a civilian high school, he entered the SNP Military Aviation School in Košice in September 1987. After graduating in 1991 he was assigned as a pilot to the 51st Aviation Regiment in Prostějov. He learned English privately and this helped him to get into an officer‘s course in the USA. Upon his return, he became a sought-after pilot for foreign missions due to his good English, of which he completed four. From February to June 1998, he flew in the SFOR mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then served from April 1999 to July 2002 as Deputy Chief of the Czech Mission at NATO Headquarters in Brunssum, the Netherlands. After that, he completed a relatively short foreign deployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina (from April to August 2005) and in the KFOR mission in Kosovo (from April to July 2007). As one of the officials of the transport helicopter base and later as a squadron commander, he played a key role in the preparation for the deployment of Czech Mi-171Š helicopters in Afghanistan. He himself served there from April to August 2010 as a contingent commander. After the first rotation, he intensively trained new airmen for deployment in Afghanistan, and left the army in September 2011. He declined an offer from former colleagues to go professional helicopter flying. By 2021, he was an amateur pilot and instructor in ultralight aircraft and lived in Držovice, Prostejov region