A plant for a war that came too soon

Mielec was born in a hurry. Poland’s Central Industrial Region plan of 1936 called for a second airframe plant for the State Aviation Works, PZL WP-2, in the south-east, far from the German border. Construction began in 1938, and in March 1939 its 700 workers began assembling PZL.37 Łoś bombers from parts delivered from Warsaw. Six months later the war began. German troops occupied Mielec on 13 September 1939.

Heinkel, then the Red Army

Under occupation the plant became part of Heinkel, making He 111 tailfins and repairing Junkers Ju 52s, with 5,500 workers by 1944. In July 1944 the retreating Germans took every machine away, and the Red Army arrived on 6 August. The factory returned to Polish hands on 22 July 1945. Its first post-war aircraft, the PZL S-1 trainer, flew on 15 November 1945; at first the plant also made bus bodies and scales. In 1948 it built ten LWD Szpak-4Ts, the first series-built Polish aircraft after the war, and 180 licence-built Po-2 biplanes as the CSS-13.

Twelve thousand biplanes

In 1949 it was renamed WSK-Mielec and became Poland’s largest aircraft maker. It built MiG-15s and MiG-17s as the Lim-1, Lim-2 and Lim-5, about 1,500 by 1964, plus the TS-8 Bies piston trainer and, from 1963, the TS-11 Iskra, the first Polish-designed jet to go into production. But its true giant was a biplane. From 1960 Mielec built the Antonov An-2 under licence, and by 2002 it had completed 11,954, mostly for the Soviet Union, including 7,880 agricultural An-2Rs. At its peak the workforce reached 18,000, and the plant also built Mikrus microcars and Melex golf carts.

The Belphegor

In the 1970s the Soviets wanted a jet replacement for the An-2 crop-sprayer, and Mielec produced the M-15 Belphegor: a biplane with a turbofan on its back, first flown on 20 May 1973. It was loud, thirsty and difficult to fly, and production stopped in 1981 after 175 — the world’s only jet agricultural aircraft. Its American-influenced M-18 Dromader, flown in 1976, did far better, with 759 built and sold widely in the West as a crop-sprayer and fire bomber. From 1984 Mielec was sole producer of the An-28, which it developed into the M28 Skytruck and Bryza.

Black Hawks in the Carpathian foothills

The end of Communism brought collapse. Exports to the Eastern Bloc vanished, the workforce fell to 1,200–1,400, the president was arrested in 1998 and the state firm was restructured as Polskie Zakłady Lotnicze. On 16 March 2007 Sikorsky bought it, a sale the Polish military press criticised as too cheap. Mielec now builds UH-60M fuselage sections, assembles the S-70i Black Hawk, of which the Philippines ordered 48, and since Lockheed Martin bought Sikorsky in 2015 it makes fuselage sections for every new F-16 Block 70/72.

Fábricas

• Mielec works · Mielec, Podkarpackie (Euro-Park Mielec special economic zone) — Single main site since 1938–1939

Pessoas

• Wiesław Pastuła · company president — Arrested in June 1998 on suspicion of acting against the company’s interests
• Janusz Zakręcki · company president from 2005 — Led the company into the Sikorsky sale

Recordes e pioneirismos

• M-15 Belphegor: the world’s only jet agricultural aircraft
• Largest aerospace manufacturer in post-war Poland
• 11,954 licence-built An-2s, the largest single-type production run at the plant