Zoltán Dani

Dani is a Socialist Party of Serbia candidate in the 2022 general election, and is positioned 26th on the SPS ballot list.

Since retiring from military service, Dani has opened a bakery and a family restaurant in his native village Skorenovac. He is of Hungarian and Romanian ancestry; his paternal family are Székelys of Bukovina, like the majority of inhabitants of the village, settling Vojvodina in the late 19th century, while his mother was of Banat Romanian ancestry.

Ten years after the events, the Hungarian military aviation magazine Aranysas, volume 11/2009, carried an extensive article on Zoltán Dani's story, on the occasion of his visit at the Hungarian Air Defence Collection, an NGO-operated SAM museum at Zsámbék. Certain aspects of the F-117 shootdown story and general Yugoslav AAA activity during the Kosovo War were publicly disclosed for the first time in the article.

This reduction in missile capability was justified, because of the expected strictly limited time slots and occasions where a Yugoslav SAM battery could open fire in face of a tremendous NATO Wild Weasel capability, with any hope of self-preservation. The lean use of SAMs also became a necessity later on, as the initial 24 March 1999, 20:20 NATO air strike destroyed eighty reloads of ready to use V-601M missiles stored in two concrete vaults at the Jakovo SAM base.

On the particular night of the F-117 shootdown, 27 March 1999, Dani broke his own ruleset. He had information about unfavorable Adriatic weather conditions and Yugoslav spies residing near Italian NATO airbases informed the Yugoslav Air Defense HQ about lack of EA-6 Prowler electronic jammer and "Wild Weasel" anti-SAM aircraft launches during the late evening. Therefore, any F-117s in the air on that night were alone in the dark, but with high crew morale due to their invulnerability during previous day's sorties.

Dani also claims that his unit downed the commander's F-16 plane from the Aviano-based 555th Fighter Squadron "Triple Nickel". On May 1/2, 1999 the F-16 (s/n 88-0550) had already completed its combat sortie and was flying outbound from Yugoslav airspace, when its on-board radar warning receiver indicated illumination from Dani's SA-3 fire control radar. The pilot, Lt. Col. David L. Goldfein, decided to turn back and attack, but this proved a mistake, as two missiles were already underway and one hit his plane. Dani was not actually in the combat shift (for a unit to provide 24h/day readiness the crew is divided in 3 shifts) when the shootdown occurred. The shift was commanded by Maj. Boško Dotlić.

Radar sets obtained from confiscated Iraqi MiG-21 planes were planted around the SAM sites to serve as active emitter decoys, which diverted some anti-radiation missiles from the actual targets (dozens of Iraqi MiG-21/23 warplanes, sent to Yugoslavia for industrial overhaul, were seized in 1991, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait). Retired SAM radar sets were used as optical decoys, left at well-known military bases to lure NATO warplanes to waste munition on worthless targets. Owing to these measures, Dani's unit evaded 23 incoming HARM missiles, all of which impacted off-site with insignificant or zero damages.

Based on experiences learned from the 1982 Lebanon War, constant relocation of all assets was key to survival of Dani's unit, the 3rd missile detachment of the 250th Yugoslav Air Defense Battalion. Although the SA-3 / "S-125M Neva" system is not a mobile SAM complex per design, its solid fueled missiles are transportable in near combat ready condition (in fact the Polish Armed Forces and Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces each created mobile versions of the SA-3 on T-72 and T-55 tank chassis respectively in the 1990s).

Zoltán Dani (Hungarian: Dani Zoltán, Serbian Cyrillic: Золтан Дани; 23 July 1956) is a former officer of the Yugoslav army and former commander of the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade, which shot down a NATO F-117 Nighthawk near the village of Buđanovci on 27 March 1999, during the Kosovo War. The hit was achieved with a S-125 surface-to-air missile system. He was initially unknown to the public and aliased with the name Gvozden Đukić. However, upon retiring from the military, he revealed his identity.

The radio signal logs of unit 250/3 contain two further proximity fuse activation pings beyond the F-117 and F-16 shootdown events, indicating that either extra NATO aircraft were hit or ALE-50 towed jammer devices were destroyed by the missiles, as opposed to the SAMs simply missing due to radar jamming or chaff dispersal. The one recorded on the 30.4.1999. by the combat shift commanded by Major Boško Dotlić corresponds to a hit on a second F-117 which managed to return to its base in Spangdahlem, Germany only to be written off. The other ping was recorded on 19. 5. 1999. by the combat shift commanded by Lt. Col.Đorđe Aničić (Dani's second in command). In his published wartime diary Aničić stated that the target had a large radar reflection and that the battery received unconfirmed reports that they hit a USAF B-2 strategic bomber which supposedly had crashed in Croatia near the border with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, although Dani was of the opinion that they hit a towed decoy instead.

A documentary movie The 21st Second was made about Zoltán Dani. Dani also participated in the documentary movie The Second Meeting, where he met Dale Zelko, the F-117 pilot he had shot down.