The ground floor houses the transportation exhibition. Naturally, we are most interested in aviation. In the second gallery, you can see aircraft engines and aircraft themselves – such as the Supermarine Spitfire LF Mk.IXE from 1945, which stands on the ground, and the Zlín aircraft (Z-50LA and Z-XIII), Sokol M1-C, Avia BH-9 and BH-10, Etrich E.VIII, and many others suspended from the ceiling. You can also explore the gondola of a K-type balloon or the HC 2 Heli Baby helicopter, among other things. As I was accompanied by aviation historian Ing. Ivo Pujman, we will discuss the exhibits that caught my attention most at the end.
But now, let’s move to the conference hall, where NTM aviation curator Michal Plavec prepared a very interesting lecture for Ženy v letectví, z.s. (Women in Aviation Association) entitled “Pioneering Aviatrices in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and the Czechoslovak Republic.”
Originally, moving through the air was referred to as ‘větroplavba’ (gliding), then ‘vzduchoplavba’ (aerial navigation), and the term ‘letectví’ (aviation) has been in use for the shortest time, officially since the autumn of 1923.
The first person to ascend into the air in the Czech lands was the French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard on October 30, 1790, along with Count Jáchym ze Šternberka, a native of Bohemia. They immediately encountered wind shear on their first flight.
The first woman to fly over Prague was Wilhelmine Reichard in May 1820. Her husband, a university-educated chemist, was the second balloon pilot in Germany. Wilhelmine became the first German female balloonist, making over 40 flights, one of them in Prague. She took off from the Stromovka chateau and landed near Bříství.
Magdalene Eichorn, likely the first woman born in the territory of Bohemia to make a balloon flight, ascended with Carl Kirsch on September 16, 1849.
The first female pilot of heavier-than-air aircraft was Božena Gabriela Věnceslava Laglerová, a native of Královské Vinohrady (a district of Prague). On September 27, 1911, she was officially recognized as the first Czech female pilot with FAI diploma No. 125, the first female pilot with an FAI diploma in Austria-Hungary, and the second after Melli Beese in Germany.
The second Czech female pilot only came 17 years later: Anežka Šedivcová-Formánková.
Prejudice against women at the controls was strong, and Lilly Steinscheider, the first female pilot in Hungary, born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1891, also faced it. For example, when she crashed an aircraft, an advertisement appeared in a Viennese satirical magazine that read something like: “Free firewood, several cubic meters immediately available for transport. Lilly Steinscheider.” Lilly was one of the first women in Budapest to obtain a driver’s license in 1911. She was also a member of one of the first women’s aero clubs, Stella. In 1913, she joined the Association of Emancipated Women. In 1914, she was scheduled to complete one of her last flights in Piešťany (now in Slovakia), a month before the outbreak of World War I, but she had no aircraft to fly and canceled her participation. In the first days of the war, she applied to the Austro-Hungarian military aviation service, which immediately rejected her. Eventually, she served as a volunteer nurse on the Russian front. Between the wars, she had a Czechoslovak passport and Czechoslovak citizenship.
However, flying isn’t just about female pilots. Did you know that princesses were among the very first flight attendants in this region? In fact, two of them – Maria Theresia Thurn-Taxis and her younger sister Eleonora Amélie, daughters of Erich Thurn-Taxis, at one time a shareholder of the Mladá Boleslav-based automaker Laurin & Klement (later Škoda Auto).
Marie Krupičková achieved two firsts, becoming the first Czech female parachutist (jump in September 1930). In addition, she was the first woman in Europe to obtain an international diploma in radiotelegraphy. She also successfully completed a pilot course at the West Bohemian Aeroclub in Plzeň. She was employed as a clerk at Czechoslovak State Airlines.
Many other ladies could certainly be discussed, but Mr. Plavec’s lecture, packed with information, interesting facts, and period photographs, has ended, and I promised that I would take a closer look at the exhibits in the NTM that caught my eye with Ivo Pujman. Let’s get to it.
The first of them is the aircraft Anatra DS Anasal:
“The piece hanging here comes from production in Odessa, Ukraine. It is the only surviving example in the world. When the Germans and Austrians occupied part of Ukraine in 1918, they also occupied the ANATRA aircraft factory, so ANASAL aircraft were then manufactured for the Austro-Hungarian Air Force for training purposes. There were quite a few of these machines in the Austro-Hungarian Air Force at the end of World War I, and therefore 23 of them entered service, mainly as training machines, even in the very beginnings of the new Czechoslovakia. That is why the exhibited specimen also has the original cockades from the initial period of the construction of the Czechoslovak Military Aviation. Interestingly, the ANATRA ANASAL machine had a nine-cylinder Salmson 9U radial engine, but water-cooled. These engines cooled very poorly, and occasionally this caused fires on this aircraft.”
The second aircraft that caught my attention is the L.W.F. Model V Tractor:
“It is a two-seat training biplane from World War I. The wingspan of the upper wing is 14.20 m, the lower 12.80 m. It was manufactured in America from 1917 until it was replaced in pilot schools by the much more famous and successful Curtiss Jenny, which then became the standard American training aircraft. When the Czechs in the Legions in Russia tried to obtain some training aircraft for their own air unit during their Siberian Anabasis in 1918, they bought 18 of these machines in the USA. However, they were in poor condition because the Americans themselves had previously used them intensively during World War I and then sent them, worn out, often damaged, in disassembled condition to the Czech Legions in Siberia. Our people assembled them in Omsk and started a pilot school with them (one of the graduates was, for example, Maj. Skála). The very first aircraft that the Czech mechanics in the air unit assembled took off in Vladivostok and immediately crashed, so the machine was practically destroyed, and the pilot Vlastimil Fiala was almost killed. In 1920, only the remaining four pieces were transported to the new Czechoslovakia, but none of them flew.
This aircraft is absolutely unique, and it is almost a miracle that it has been preserved because very few were made. The NTM has the only surviving machine in the world. It has a wooden structure with a canvas covering and was fitted with a Hall-Scott engine – but this is now missing in the exhibit.
In addition to these two aircraft, another absolute unique item in the NTM collections is the Knoller C.II – an aircraft that flew poorly, crashed quite often, was structurally not very good, was workshop-made, to put it mildly, very carelessly, had no extra performance, and was simply the terror of pilots.
It has been part of the NTM collections for 107 years, paradoxically because the only example located after the First World War on the territory of the newly formed Czechoslovakia did not dare to include it in the equipment of even the new Czechoslovak military air force after 1918, even though it was in great need of any aircraft. The aviation arsenal preferred to donate this machine directly to the collections of the then NTM in 1919.”
Ivo Pujman selected one more aircraft to tell us more about, the Avia BH-10:
“The NTM has an Avia BH-9 and BH-10, while Kbely (Aviation Museum Kbely in Prague) has an Avia BH-10 and BH-11. The aircraft here comes from the second series and in the 1930s served as the personal sports aircraft of Mr. Zlobický. He was a sports pilot, commissioner, and referee for sports flying of the National Aeroclub. He himself flew for AeK (Academic Aeroclub) of university sports. When the military administration decommissioned this particular aircraft, he received it as a gift. I know that the acrobat Široký, who also flew it, did not like it very much and was a little afraid of it.
After the arrival of the Germans, all aircraft had to be handed over, and Mr. Zlobický circumvented the requirement by immediately donating the Avia to the NTM, and therefore it has been in its collections since March 1939.
This aviator married Miss Bílková, who was the first female pilot trained in Prague during the First Republic (the interwar Czechoslovakia). And so we have beautifully returned to women in aviation.”
Source: NTM, M. Plavec, I. Pujman, Aviation Digital Library ČsSL, Wikipedia
