A factory moved to Mostar

In the late 1940s the Yugoslav government decided its aircraft industry was too concentrated around Belgrade. So a large part of the aeronautical division of Ikarus at Zemun, machinery and people together, was uprooted and moved to Mostar in Herzegovina. In 1950 the transplanted works became a new company, Soko, which means falcon. Its first director was an army colonel, Ivan Sert. Soko began by maintaining the air force’s American-supplied F-84 Thunderjets and building the Soko 522 piston trainer, which first flew in February 1955; about 110 were built and it served as the air force’s primary trainer until 1978.

The Seagull, Yugoslavia’s first production jet

Soko’s first jet was designed by the Aeronautical Technical Institute in Belgrade to replace the Lockheed T-33. The G-2 Galeb, or Seagull, first flew on 3 July 1961 and went into production at Mostar in 1964–1965, making it the first jet to be mass-produced in socialist Yugoslavia. It was a curiously British aircraft, with a Rolls-Royce Viper engine, Folland ejection seats and much British equipment. Libya bought more than 100. A single-seat attack version, the J-21 Jastreb, or Hawk, flew on 19 July 1965; 224 were built. Galeb production ended in 1985 at 248.

Eagle and Vulture: Tito and Ceauşescu’s jet

In 1971 Yugoslavia and Romania, both led by men keen to keep Moscow at arm’s length, agreed to build a ground-attack jet together. To spare national pride it carried two names, the J-22 Orao, or Eagle, in Yugoslavia and the IAR-93 Vultur in Romania, and the two prototypes made their first flights on the same day, 31 October 1974, by arrangement. Britain refused to licence the engine for a supersonic version, so the Orao stayed subsonic, though on 22 November 1984 one became the first Yugoslav-designed aircraft to exceed Mach 1, in a shallow dive. Soko also built the G-4 Super Galeb trainer, first flown on 17 July 1978, and licence-built helicopters, notably the Aérospatiale Gazelle.

The fighter that never flew

By the 1980s the Mostar works covered some 450,000 square metres beside the airport and Soko’s wider workforce was about 8,000. Its next project was the Novi Avion, a supersonic multi-role fighter heavily influenced by France and Dassault’s Rafale, intended to replace the air force’s roughly 120 MiG-21s. Production was planned to start around 1991, with a first flight in 1992. Neither happened. The break-up of Yugoslavia and an international arms embargo killed the programme, and blocked Super Galeb orders from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Destroyed by its own country’s war

The war came to Mostar itself. The factory lay in the front line; production stopped in 1992 and most of its machinery was destroyed or stolen. Parts of the plant were dismantled and taken to Serbia, where they joined Utva at Pančevo, which had already built Orao and Super Galeb components. Soko’s aircraft fought on for both sides of the wars that destroyed it: Galebs, Jastrebs and Oraos flew ground-attack sorties in Croatia and Bosnia, and many were wrecked on the ground in the NATO bombing of 1999. In 2019 Serbia was the last air force flying the Orao.

Fabrieken

• Mostar works · near Mostar Airport, Bosnia and Herzegovina — About 450,000 square metres; machinery destroyed, stolen or moved to Serbia in 1991–1992

Mensen

• Ivan Sert · first director — Yugoslav People’s Army colonel
• Ljubomir Zekavica · test pilot — First flight of the G-2 Galeb, 1961
• Vladislav Slavujević · test pilot — First flight of the J-22 Orao prototype, 1974

Records en primeurs

• G-2 Galeb: first mass-produced jet in socialist Yugoslavia
• J-22 Orao: first Yugoslav-designed aircraft to exceed Mach 1, 22 November 1984