He finished his studies in Enying, and was 18 years old when he volunteered for the Royal Hungarian Air Force.

He was trained as a fighter pilot, and took part in 1/2 FS's operations in northern Hungary with the Fiat CR.32.

The victim being a German Heinkel He 111 bomber that opened fire on him while Szentgyörgyi was trying to identify the aircraft.

By the end of the war he had completed more than 220 sorties, and had 30 confirmed kills; the most successful Hungarian fighter pilot.

Between 1950 and 1956 he spent several years in Communist prisons, before becoming a pilot of the renamed Malév Hungarian Airlines again, logging 12,334 flight hours and covering more than 5 million kilometres in the air.

On 28 August 1971 Szentgyörgyi was the pilot of MALEV Hungarian Airlines Flight 731, and was among the 32 people killed when the Ilyushin Il-18 (HA-MOC) crashed into the sea during a storm on its approach to a landing in Copenhagen in Denmark.