Anniversary - Air Transport
ANNIVERSARY / AIR TRANSPORT
Carmaker spreads its wings
ŠKODA AUTO has been using regular air transport for a long time, including 30 years for its regular service to Braunschweig
lthough air transport was nothing special for the Mladá Boleslav carmaker even before 1989, the merger with the VW Group created a logical need for regular meetings between ŠKODA AUTO employees and their foreign colleagues, which meant frequent trips to Wolfsburg. Therefore, the carmaker began organising air transport to the airport in Braunschweig, which is located near the corporate headquarters. For its regular Prague–Braunschweig–Prague flights, it initially used smaller airlines starting in April 1991: ŠKODA Air in Pilsen and Slov-Air in Bratislava, which provided their 16-seater LET L-410 airplanes. The smaller Cessna 421 was provided by the Czech Aerospace Research Centre. However, the obsolete L-410 did not have a pressurised cabin, so ŠKODA employees switched to TOP Air’s Beechcraft 1900C and 200 King Air airplanes in 1992–1995.
For the next five years, they would travel briefly with ABA Air and then Air Ostrava on board its Swedish Saab 340. After the airline went bankrupt and briefly using the Danish Air Transport carrier’s planes, long-term cooperation with ČSA began in May 2000. The importance of air transport for the carmaker’s operations is clear from the figures of 2019, which predate the coronavirus pandemic: more than 1,000 take-offs and landings of the ATR 42 and 72 airplanes on the Prague–Braunschweig–Prague business service were supplemented by another 75 special flights. Before the service was suspended in March 2020 by decision of Czech government and EU, it carried around 20,000 passengers a year.
FIS/2 Travel Management & Flight Operations Department, which ensures smooth air transport for the carmaker, must meet its colleagues’ requirements for air transport and overall business trip organisation during regular operations. Among other things, this includes travel order processing, advance deposits, insurance, visas, ticket booking, car rentals and accommodation, as well as the handling of the TRAM and TRAM FLIGHT travel applications. The team members also provide their operational management of flight orders or airplane capacity planning. ED
Did you know that...
...the carmaker was already using the Liberec air taxi in 1955? At that time, this service was operated by Czechoslovak Airlines, which provided charter flights for companies and individuals. ČSA had about 50 Aero Ae-45 airplanes available for its air taxi. This all-metal twin-engine airplane was made by Aero Vodochody between 1947 and 1951 and then by Let Kunovice until 1961. It is worth mentioning that the Aero Ae-45S was the first Czechoslovak aircraft to cross the Atlantic Ocean, in 1958.
Birth of the company fleet
The creation of air transport at the Mladá Boleslav car plant started thanks to its director, Miroslav Zapadlo, in 1976, which coincided with the problematic launch of the Š 105/120 models, which had been delayed by a year. The then–Federal Ministry of Transportation actually granted the company permission to manage and operate civilian airplanes, and the socialist carmaker used the facilities and runway of the Mladá Boleslav Airport for air transport. At the end of the 1980s, the four-seat L 200 airplanes were still being used to transport top managers and production materials that were in short supply. Although it is not possible to find out how many airplanes the carmaker used at the time, several airplanes with the following registration marks are known: OK-PFM, OK-FLO and OK-PLE. It is interesting to note that they still fly today. After the carmaker stopped using these planes, Czech aero clubs bought them up. For example, the OK-PFM airplane was bought by the carmaker in 1976, and with AZNP (Automobile Plant, National Enterprise) it completed approximately 142 hours and 120 starts. The OK-FLO airplane belonged to the first series of six airplanes made under the L200A designation. In the Ventil newspaper of 1989, the then-head of air transport, František Malý (the man in the B&W photo and also the current department coordinator’s father) wrote that the carmaker also had its L-200A aircraft with the OK-PLE registration mark.