Decommissioned Aircraft
Evangelos Yannaris was born in 1916 in Athens. In September 1936 he joined the Officers’ Department of the Air Force School. He graduated in August 1939 with the rank of Lieutenant and the degree of pilot. At the beginning of the Greek-Italian War he served in the 3/2 Military Cooperation Squadron. On the morning of October 30 1940, he was ordered to take off as the third crew of an equal number of HENSHEL 126s piloted by Chief Sergeant Leonidas Tsadas, to provide cover (reconnaissance and bombing) for the front covering the Western Macedonia Army Division. They made several successful “sorties”. In the last (and fatal) one, two Greek HS 126s engaged five Italian FiatCR 42 fighters of the 392nd Fighter Squadron. During the air battle the aircraft of Yannaris – Tsadas receives a barrage of fire, which forces its pilot (after evasive maneuvers) to make an emergency landing with a punctured engine, near the hill Prophet Elias outside the village of Vassiliada in the prefecture of Kastoria. There, Tsadas realizes that Yannaris is dead from the gunfire. Thus, early on, Evangelos Yannaris enters the pantheon of Heroes and takes the place of the first fallen Greek Officer of the historic Epic of 1940.
The Homeland honoured Evangelos Yannaris by promoting him after his death to Lieutenant and awarding him the Flying Cross. In November 2007, during events held every year in his honour in the village of Vassiliada in Kastoria, a bust of him and a F-104 Air Force aircraft were placed in a square named after him.