Military pilot, engineer, doctor of technical sciences and the last pilot of the Yugoslav Royal Air Force.

Zlatko

Dino

As a child, he watched hawks and imagined that one day he would fly just like them.

- I could not have dreamed that I would experience and see so much in my lifetime. Even today, as when I was young, I can only say that flying is my great love. It's like a drug, something that has kept me going all these years - the colonel told Večernji list just a few years before his death. In his old age, he was not in Jastrebarski for a long time, and all his life he remembered his birthplace and the birds he admired as a boy.

At an early age, he completed a sailing course in Vršac, and in 1940 he entered and graduated from the pilot school of the Yugoslav Royal Air Force. He participated in the April War in 1941 between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany, and after the occupation he lived and worked in Zagreb until 1943, when he joined the partisans. During the war, he was a pilot and political commissar of the squadron.

After the end of the war, he trained in Italy and the Soviet Union and was employed at the Aviation Technical Institute. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade in 1948 and from the Soviet Aviation Engineering Academy Žukovski. He received his master's degree in 1954 at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, and his doctorate in 1964 at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade. He was one of the most educated JNA officers with knowledge of English, Russian and German.

At first, he was the head of aerodynamics at the Aviation Technical Institute, and eventually became its director. Together with the professors of the Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Belgrade, he founded the Higher Military Aviation Technical Academy in Žarkov in 1966, where highly educated experts for the needs of aviation were trained.

He was responsible for the production projects of the Yugoslav aircraft G-2 Galeb, J-21 Hawk and J-20 Kraguj. During his flying career, he flew on 47 types of aircraft until 1959.

Later, he taught Aerodynamics at Yugoslav military schools and at the Center for Strategic Studies of the General Staff of the JNA. He published more than 20 books in the field of aeronautical engineering and aircraft testing, and his textbooks on aerodynamics and flight theory are still among the best works in the field.

- It sounds immodest, but everything that was done related to the aviation of the former state, went through me. On many matters I directly decided or answered directly to Tito. - Zlatko once said. He was one of the most important personalities of Yugoslavia. His biographers write that Zlatko participated in many important state and secret missions, and in 1981 he entered a well-deserved retirement.

Zlatko was also a member of the International Aviation Academy, the International Astronomical Academy as well as many aviation associations. He died at the age of 101, a recipient of many wartime and peacetime decorations.

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The last pilot of the Yugoslav Royal Air Force