A works beside the railway halt

In 1936 the Skoda concern’s Avia company began building a branch factory beside the railway halt at Kunovice in Moravia. It was never finished as planned: before and during the war it served only as a repair works. After nationalisation a new national enterprise, LET Kunovice, was founded in 1950 and a new plant was completed in 1953, served by a 3.6-kilometre railway siding with its own platforms for the workforce. Briefly renamed in 1957 as the Works of the First Five-Year Plan, it reverted to LET in 1967. Its first products were licence-built: 707 C-11s, the Czechoslovak version of the Yakovlev Yak-11 trainer, and Aero Ae 45 and Ae 145 light twins.

The world’s most common glider

Kunovice’s most famous product weighs less than half a tonne empty. The L-13 Blaník, a two-seat all-metal training glider designed by Karel Dlouhý, first flew in 1956 and entered production in 1958. Cheap, tough and easy to fly, it spread across the Eastern bloc and was exported in large numbers to the West. More than 3,000 were built including variants, and more than half a century later it is still the most numerous glider in the world. The US Air Force Academy flew it as the TG-10C until 2012. Let also built the L-200 Morava light twin and the Z-37 Čmelák crop-duster.

An airliner for Aeroflot

In the mid-1960s Let saw an opportunity in Moscow. Aeroflot wanted a turboprop to replace the Antonov An-2 biplane on its vast network of rough local airfields, and Let’s answer, the L-410 Turbolet, first flew on 16 April 1969. Aeroflot was unimpressed with early versions, so Let produced the L-410 UVP with bigger wings and tail for short-field work, at the cost of four seats. It worked: more than 1,000 had been built by 1990, and the type flew from the Arctic to the tropics in temperatures from minus 50 to plus 50 degrees. Let’s bid to go bigger, the 40-seat L-610, flew in 1988 but never entered production; only eight were built.

Bankruptcies and Russian owners

The end of communism nearly finished the company. Privatised and bought by the American crop-duster maker Ayres in 1998, Let was starved of investment and declared bankrupt in 2000. Moravan of Otrokovice took it over in 2001 and went bankrupt in turn in 2004. In 2005 Aircraft Industries, owned by the Czech businessman Pavel Musela’s PAMCO, bought the works, and in 2008 sold 51 per cent to the Russian metals group UGMK, which bought the rest by 2013. In November 2011 a former employee shot dead two board members at the plant before turning the gun on himself, one of the darkest days in Kunovice’s history.

Back in Czech hands

Under Russian ownership Let developed the L 410 NG, with a longer nose, new wing, glass cockpit and GE H85 engines that doubled the range; it first flew on 29 July 2015 and entered series production in March 2018. Then the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought sanctions that cut Let off from its main passenger-aircraft market, Russia. In April 2022 the Prague-based Omnipol group bought the company, returning it to Czech ownership. More than 1,200 L-410s have been built, and the company still runs Kunovice airport, the sixth largest in the Czech Republic, and its own vocational school.

Factories

• Kunovice works and airport · Kunovice, Zlín Region — Begun 1936 beside the railway halt; LET 01 plant completed 1953; company airport is the sixth largest in the Czech Republic

People

• Karel Dlouhý · glider designer (VZLÚ) — Designed the L-13 Blaník

Records and firsts

• L-13 Blaník: the most numerous glider in the world
• Blaník set many two-seat world distance records in the 1960s
• L-610: the largest aircraft designed in the Czech Republic