I supervised Janos, an Hungarian young engineer, since when he first came at the VKI, i.e. the research institute who has been my employer till 2017. Since the very beginning, it was clear that he was an exceptionally gifted guy, he could learn complex things super fast and his research project was a total success, even exceeding the initial goals I had set for him. After that, I insisted to keep Janos onboard and, luckily, VKI found some funding to employ him as a junior research engineer.
I cannot claim we were close friends, but we definitely interacted a lot and after I got employed as senior research engineer, after finishing my PhD, I became his line manager in practice and we got closer as friends too. In particular, he helped me a lot by supervising a talented Italian student (Emanuele) for his master thesis and especially providing me some inputs for a challenging ESA project we were working on. Just for the records for any computational engineer/scientist reading this, he was providing me computational meshes for running some challenging 3D flow simulations aiming at characterizing the thermal loads acting on the surface of a prototype ESA space vehicle (EXPERT) in hypersonic flight conditions.
Janos had a fascination for motorbikes but, initially, he was still undecided whether to buy a car or a motorbike and he asked me for some advice. Being naturally scared of motorbikes, I recommended him to buy a car. Unfortunately, he didn't follow my advice and he bought a second-hand motorbike... He was the kind of young guy who feels indestructible, confident and always in control. Unfortunately, he didn't feel alarmed even after barely surviving a monstrous accident on his mountain bike (running down some steep road in the hills at crazy speed) with significant wounds on his legs and forehead. His comment about his accident was that it had been so stupid of him to have fallen and the next time he would have succeeded without falling. I must be honest and say that, already then, I seriously thought that he probably hadn't learned the tough lesson for the way he was speaking...
Fast forward a few weeks, Janos had another accident, this time with his new motorbike in which he hurt himself on his leg but not too significantly. Again, his comment was that he was having troubles handling his new toy but he would have got it under control, eventually. It was just a matter of time and experience driving it.
Friday 27/11/2009. I worked till late and then, before leaving, I accidentally crossed path with Janos who apparently was also still around, working on some new stuff. He was enthusiast. He told me that he had spoken to our common project manager (Patrick), who had agreed to let him start a PhD on a topic he really liked, Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC), an up-and-coming topic of which he had quickly become the local VKI expert. Idea which I found brilliant and definitely appropriate for such a bright mind. We greeted and, while he was walking back to his office, just 5 meters further, I noticed for the first time how funny was his way of walking. That's the last time I would have seen him alive.
Monday 30/11/2009. Janos sent an e-mail to both Patrick and me to inform us that he would have taken a day off. No problem for us, of course.
Tuesday 1/12/2009. When I went out, around 10AM, I noticed how exceptionally dark the skies were looking that day. I literally thought that it was the darkest, most gloomy morning I had ever seen in my life. It was not just the dark clouds, I also felt a strange undefinable vibe, like a funeral atmosphere. I have recently realized that this unqualifiable sensation was probably just an indecipherable premonition of what was about to happen.
I remember driving to work and stopping to let a person cross on a pedestrian path and mentally laughing at the fact that I had been so good in doing that, that probably I would have been rewarded later on in some karmic fashion. I couldn't have been more wrong this time...
At the exit of the forest, just a couple of km far from VKI, cars were standing in an unexpected long queue. It took not too long to realize something bad had happened. A motorbiker was on the ground, face down, still wearing his helmet and in a totally frozen position. When passing next to him with my car at a very low speed, I looked at a few people who were standing close to him on the other side of the narrow road, speechless. I can still remember the deep sadness depicted on their face. For the first time in my life, I felt on my skin the coldness of death, it was in the air somehow. For a moment, I had the felling that time had stopped. I also got a sort of vertigo, as I was about to lose consciousness. Then, I thought "this poor guy is dead" and I had to hold tears from falling. Didn't know the guy but I still felt the urge to cry, but I suppressed it. In the two remaining km before reaching VKI, my mind started rolling. When I entered the gate, while looking for a parking spot, I was suddenly induced to notice that I could not see Janos' motorbike anywhere. All of a sudden, I realized. I rushed upstairs, talked to his best Hungarian friend (Tamas) and asked him whether he had seen Janos. He said that he had just spoken with him on the phone. When? 10 minutes ago. I asked him to call him back because I had seen an accident and I had a bad feeling.
Janos didn't answer, neither to Tamas or to me who called him a few minutes later, once in my office. "I'm afraid Janos is dead, what a tragedy!", I told my astonished office mates.
The dark skies I had noticed in the morning didn't lie to me that day. The indestructible Janos was gone. He was only 26 years old. Unfortunately, he hadn't listened to the many signals life had been sending him during the last few months in order to warn him. I hope he found the freedom and strength he sought for, wherever he went after that crash. His spirit is still alive and undefeated somewhere, that's for sure.
That day was the only time in my life in which I cried in public, in front of many colleagues, and I still did it today when writing this...
R.I.P. Janos
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