1919 First Plane Hijacking in History

1919 (exact date unknown, possibly between March-July): During the chaotic aftermath of World War I, Hungarian aristocrat and geologist Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás became the first person in history to hijack an airplane[dubious - discuss] in a desperate plot to flee persecution at the hands of the communist regime of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, after Franz was unable to obtain a passport to leave the country. Franz, a former spy during the war, forged documents from the Ministry of War that convinced the military commander at the Mátyásföld Airfield on the outskirts of Budapest to provide Franz and his Albanian partner, Bajazid Elmaz Doda, with a small airplane and a pilot. Somewhere over Győr, approximately halfway between Budapest and their supposed destination of Sopron, Franz pulled out a revolver, held it to the pilot's head, and demanded to be flown to Vienna, where Franz and Doda lived until their deaths in 1933. After a lifelong and debilitating struggle with depression, and overcome by his financial difficulties, Franz fatally shot Doda in his sleep and then turned the gun on himself in an act of murder-suicide. Although he died penniless and in relative obscurity, Franz is regarded today as the "father of paleobiology" due to his significant and groundbreaking discoveries in the study of dinosaur fossils in Europe.