Boomerangs in a sugar factory

On 19 June 1919 two engineers, Pavel Beneš and Miroslav Hajn, set up a workshop to repair and build aircraft in a rented former sugar factory at Vysočany in Prague, with eight workmen: five carpenters and three locksmiths. They took the name from the aviators’ club both belonged to. To raise money they made propellers, gliders, model kits and boomerangs. Their first powered aircraft, the all-wooden BH-1, flew in 1920; BH stood for Beneš and Hajn, and the initials would mark Avia designs for a decade. The BH-3 became the first series-built Czechoslovak monoplane fighter.

Bondy, Škoda and Letňany

When a partner left in 1921, Beneš brought in his university friend Miloš Bondy and his brother Karel, and from 1924 the Bondy family owned the firm outright. By 1926 Avia had 350 employees and the defence ministry was making it the army’s main fighter supplier; the BH-21 biplane of 1925 was built in 184 examples, some under licence in Belgium. Under ministry pressure the Bondys sold out to the Škoda concern in 1928, and in 1931 a new factory at Letňany gathered Škoda’s aviation work in one place, making Avia Czechoslovakia’s largest builder of all-metal aircraft. It licence-built Fokker airliners and, from 1937, the Soviet Tupolev SB bomber as the B-71.

The B-534: last of the great biplanes

Avia’s masterpiece was the B-534, designed by František Novotný. The prototype flew on 25 May 1933, and at the international flying meeting at Dübendorf near Zürich in 1937 it outflew every fighter there except the new Messerschmitt Bf 109, and was only 11 km/h slower than that. 568 were built from 1933 to 1939, but Czechoslovakia was given up without a fight; after the German occupation of March 1939 the last were finished for the Luftwaffe. On 2 September 1944, during the Slovak National Uprising, a B-534 shot down a transport aircraft, the last recorded air-to-air victory by a biplane fighter.

The Mule that became Israel’s Knife

During the occupation Avia built parts for Messerschmitt and Arado aircraft. After the war it assembled Bf 109Gs from leftover parts, but the Daimler-Benz engines had gone, so it fitted the Junkers Jumo 211 bomber engine instead. The result, the S-199, first flew in March 1947. Czech pilots called it the Mezek, the Mule: it was troublesome to fly and its faulty gun synchroniser led some pilots to shoot off their own propellers. Yet when Israel urgently needed fighters in 1948 it bought S-199s, and as the Sakeen, the Knife, it became the first fighter of the Israeli Air Force. Around 550 were built. Avia also built the S-92, a licence Me 262 and Czechoslovakia’s first jet fighter.

From Ilyushins to lorries

In the 1950s Avia built about 1,200 Ilyushin Il-10 attack aircraft as the B-33 and 203 Il-14 airliners as the Avia 14, and the last of Novotný’s designs, the Av-36 Bojar, had flown in 1946. Aircraft production ended around 1960, after which Avia made aero engines and propellers and, above all, lorries: from 1968 its Renault-licensed A15 and A30 trucks became a fixture of Eastern European roads. After 1989 the company passed through Daewoo, Odien and Ashok Leyland; since 2016 Avia Motors has belonged to the Czechoslovak Group and builds trucks at Přelouč, while Avia Propeller still makes propellers at Letňany.

Factories

• Vysočany sugar factory · Prague-Vysočany — First workshop, 1919
• Holešovice · Osadní Street, Prague (now DOX art centre) — Former Aero works, from 1923
• Letňany works · Letňany, Prague — Škoda’s aviation centre from 1931; trucks from the late 1950s
• Přelouč · Přelouč, Pardubice Region — Avia Motors truck plant since 2016

People

• Pavel Beneš · co-founder and designer
• Miroslav Hajn · co-founder and designer
• Miloš Bondy · owner from 1921–1924 to 1928
• František Novotný · chief designer — B-534 and Av-36 Bojar

Records and firsts

• B-534: last recorded air-to-air victory by a biplane fighter, 2 September 1944
• S-199: first fighter of the Israeli Air Force, 1948
• S-92: first Czechoslovak jet fighter