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"Best Pilot I Know": Xian Air Force Operational Expeditions Surrender to Cancer

Eliezer Adar made 691 sorties during his service.

The boy who was determined to be accepted to a pilot course became a key figure in some of the corps' daring operations, including gathering intelligence before the bombing of the reactor in Iraq.

He was the sole survivor in a training accident, and was forced to abandon his plane in the Yom Kippur War.

"Example of a natural pilot"

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• Air Force

• Pilots

Eli Ashkenazi

Saturday, 10 July 2021, 15:44 Updated: 15:45

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Last weekend, Eliezer Adar, a former Air Force pilot who died during his years of service, went on 691 operational sorties, the largest number in Air Force history, a figure that places him as one of the world's leading pilots.

Adar was born Leonid Simionovich in 1947 in the town of Bobruisk in Belarus (Belarus) to his parents, Shimon Vinta (Etty) Fishman.

His father went through years of hardship and anguish, from fleeing the Warsaw ghetto to staying in labor camps in Russia and fighting in military uniform for the liberation of Poland.

The mother was a soldier in the Red Army.

In an interview with Roi Ben-Tolila on the "Meir Channel" a few years ago, Adar talked about a childhood accompanied by a very difficult financial crisis.

He said that part of the time he lived in a "cemetery" of locomotives.

A book about his life written by Anat Sheinkman Ben Zeev describes how when the family moved to Minsk "he led a street gang, which climbed on trams as they slowed down, spotted dormant drunks, cut their pockets with a pocket knife or razor and robbed them. With money he bought a sausage for his brother. "Because he knew all the entrances and exits of the basements in the neighborhood and escaped quickly."

One of the leading pilots in the world.

Eliezer Adar (Photo: Courtesy of the family)

In 1957 the family moved to Poland and in 1960 immigrated to Israel. The family was sent to Upper Nazareth, but 13-year-old Eliezer was sent as a child to Kibbutz Ein Gev. Ein Gev defined "home" and remembered the childhood there as a happy period. However he also remembered moments of difficulty and loneliness, like the nights when there was no parent coming to the children's home to tell him a good night and tell him a story, or a bar mitzvah ceremony where all the children got a watch and only he did not, because he was an outcast. After a year he was adopted by the couple Ezra and Pnina Klopper who were already parents to five children. He said that before her death Pnina told him: "You were my most successful son."

When it came time to enlist in the IDF, he was determined to be accepted to a pilot's course and become a fighter pilot. , He replied without hesitation, "I will be a pilot." In the tests for the pilot course, when he asked to write three options for alternative positions in case he would not be a pilot, he wrote: "Then I'll be a fighter pilot," he replied.

"I do not want to be a pilot, I will be a pilot."

Adar with his son and daughter (Photo: courtesy of the family)

He fulfilled his dream as a trainee in course number 56, which also included former chief of staff Dan Halutz. The reactor in Iraq, chose to do it itself, was a flight that lasted three hours and 40 minutes, 240 miles across the border - the longest flight flown by low-altitude fighter jets. The squadron received a medal for carrying out the mission.

David Ivri, the commander of the Air Force at the time, wrote to the squadron: "I appreciated the excellent execution of an unconventional operation. We broke into a new field together, and this was done while presenting a very high personal and team level.

The commander of the base, Yiftach Spector, wrote: "The Air Force recently carried out a special operation of its kind, in which the 69th Squadron took the main part. The Air Force Commander saw fit to commend the operations. For my part, I would like to add and commend you here as commanders: The basis of success was the leadership you proved about your people. We need to stay and be an example to us in the future. "

Eliezer Adar with Air Force Commander Moti Hod, at the end of the pilot course (Photo: Courtesy of the family)

In January 1981 he was involved in a serious training accident.

During air combat training, his plane collided with an F-16.

Dan Weiss, the navigator who was with him, was killed and his body has not been found to this day.

The F-16 pilot, Udi Ben-Amitai, was also killed.

Adar managed to extricate himself from the plane and was injured when he fell into the stormy sea water

.

During the Yom Kippur War he was forced to abandon the Mirage 3 plane in which he was flying, after returning from a dive in which he shot down three Syrian planes.

A malfunction in the transfer of fuel on his plane forced him to abandon to the sea in the Rosh Hanikra area.

Itamar Noiner, one of the pilots of the Mirage Quartet that day, wrote about Adar on his website that "Eliezer Adar is the best pilot I know, maybe even better than (Yiftach) Spector. Everyone knows he is a good pilot. But he has to show that he is An even better pilot, so he does things that no one else can and does not dare to do. "

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During his 43 years of service as a pilot, Adar shot down six enemy aircraft. Later he was the commander of the "maintenance squadron" that established the Ramon base. Colonel Meir Gur (Guri), a friend of Adar's from the period of service in the 69th Squadron, said of him that "Eliezer was an example of a natural pilot. "He loved the flight so much and was so good on the flight, that he seemed to have merged with the plane, was a part of it and therefore his performance was amazing."

Gore is the chairman of the Hammers Squadron Veterans Club (69), which Adar commanded and when word of his death became known he wrote: "Tonight recently landed and silenced his engines forever (at least in our world) one of the most special people we knew - Eliezer Adar. Bird-man, natural pilot, talented self-taught, entrepreneur by birth, 'out of the box', educated, true friend, human being in all his being. Thanks to his personality and his 'half-full glass' approach, he managed - like the phoenix - to get up again and again after bumps and falls in his path and did much more in his life than most of us. It is especially worth noting his stubborn, brave and uncompromising fight against the severe cancer that struck him, while continuing intensive activity in his business and caring for his family. Unfortunately, in the last battle against the disease his body could not. Despite this, his spirit did not fall until his last moments, "Gur wrote.

"How painful this moment is. After all, Eliezer has always tried to convince us that gravity does not work on him. That he knows how to get out of anything that falls, lands or shows signs of worry," wrote Muki Tzur from Ein Gev.

Adar left behind his wife Rina, his children: Ram, Noam, Tali and Dan, ten grandchildren and two brothers.

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