In the first part, which you hold in your hands, we present to your attention the memoirs of veterans from His Majesty’s Air Troops, some of whom later continued their careers in the Air Force. Most of these memoirs entered the museum’s collection in its early years. Some are preserved as audio interviews recorded on tapes; others are handwritten or typewritten pages with author, date, and place of recording, with military precision, but most importantly that all are written or told honestly, without pretension or self-glorification.

Before you are the stories of people born in the 1920s, who served before, during, and shortly after the Second World War. This is the generation that revived Bulgarian aviation in the 30s of the last century, establishing modern pilot training schools, flying new aircraft, and organizing new airports. There are not as well-known to the general public as those of the air defenders of Sofia. There are no Messerschmitts and ramming, but you will find stories about the flights of other aircrafts that entered service in the Air Forces. How they were purchased and transfered to Bulgaria from Europe without radio communication and light signals, how they honourably guarded the homeland, and how they ended their earthly and aerial journey, dismantled at the place where our Museum now stands.

Stories about how our pilots walked “on foot in flight,” through the Yugoslav mountains in search of the “Macedonian Air Force,” and how German aircraft on Bulgarian airports were replaced by Russian ones.

Stories that took place 50 years before they were written down, but containing astonishing details and time-unaffected accuracy in the facts. Stories both humorous and tragic, filled with modesty and human dignity. Stories of the second generation of Bulgarian pilots, who paid with their lives, careers, and broken destinies for another lost war and national catastrophe. Who, like the first generation, found the strength to start all over again.