{"id":968,"date":"2009-11-09T05:23:33","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T05:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/kwd\/letackemuseum\/"},"modified":"2020-08-26T17:24:53","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T07:24:53","slug":"letackemuseum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/letackemuseum\/","title":{"rendered":"Letecke Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">Letecke Museum<\/h1>\n<p>There is a little-known gem of an aviation museum less than 40 minutes by public transport from Prague. The Letecke Museum was founded in 1968 on historic Kbely, Czechoslovakia\u2019s first air base after the country\u2019s formation in 1918. <\/p>\n<p>To get to the museum from Prague, buy a 100-krona (about $5 Aus) excursion ticket that provides same day open travel on all the city-area train, tram and bus lines. The metro is clean, fast and frequent. Catch a Red Line metro train to its northern terminus, Letnany, then find, say, a Number 375 bus for a 10-minute ride to the museum.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 2px double #666666; margin: 10px; vertical-align: top;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/kwd\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/mig_rowfw.jpg\" alt=\"mig_rowfw\" width=\"400\" height=\"204\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>MiG Alley: There are rows upon rows of battle weary-looking Russian-origin fighters.<\/em><\/p>\n<h3>Other options<\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">There are other travel options, including leaving the Red Line train earlier, or even catching a Yellow Line train. The museum comes up on the right hand side of the bus and it is easily distinguished by the MiG-21 sitting on a pole by the gate. The bus stop is maybe five metres past the MiG-21. <\/p>\n<p>The museum is housed in large hangars and open air displays in a corner of the old airfield.\u00a0 There is no entry charge and it is open from May to October, every day except Mondays, from 0900 to 1800. Cameras are permitted and there seems to be no staff to discourage really close-up aircraft inspections.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 2px double #666666; margin: 10px; vertical-align: top;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/kwd\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/hangarstackfwf.jpg\" alt=\"hangarstackfwf\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Ah! If only we had hangar control officers\u00a0 who could stack aircraft like this, we would have trebled our carrier aircraft potential.<\/em><\/p>\n<h3>Jammed hangars<\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Nearly all the precious museum-quality pre-WW II aircraft, including all the gliders and sectioned engines, are housed in protective hangars. However, more than half the 270-odd aircraft, including all the Russian-source helicopters, seem to be simply dumped in the open, exposed to sun, rain and snow. It is also clear that even though the hangars seem to be packed with everything that could be possibly squeezed in, there is a very large and valuable outdoors collection and perhaps an even larger \u201cspare aircraft\u201d jumble not on direct display but evidently awaiting attention.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 2px double #666666; margin: 10px; vertical-align: top;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/kwd\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/sam2guidelinefw.jpg\" alt=\"sam2guidelinefw\" width=\"300\" height=\"309\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>The musuem also displays a number of pilot-unfriendly guns and missiles, including this SAM-2 S-75 Guideline.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Unlike Russian museums, nearly all the exhibits, indoors and outdoors, have descriptive plaques written in both Czech and English.<\/p>\n<p>The museum\u2019s emphasis, naturally, is on Czech-built and Czech-flown aircraft. With a population of\u00a0 only 13 to 15 million, this small land-locked country has a remarkable aviation history, including the design, manufacture and development of\u00a0 many revolutionary aircraft. In its latter years, its Air Force and national airline, CSA, flew mainly Russian types and this is reflected in the large number of post-WW II Russian-origin fighters, bombers, transports and helicopters at the museum.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 2px double #666666; margin: 10px; vertical-align: top;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/kwd\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/f86sabrefw.jpg\" alt=\"f86sabrefw\" width=\"400\" height=\"198\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>A pleasant surprise was this immaculate ex-RAAF 3 Squadron Australian-built Rolls Royce Avon-engined Sabre Mk32, A94-923. Its increased thrust, from 6,100 pounds to 7,500 pounds, plus re-arming from six 0.5 inch to two 30 mm guns and AIM-9 Sidewinders, together with other improvements, made this version the \u201cbest Sabre of all,\u201d according to its unbiased pilots.<\/em><\/p>\n<h3>Avon-Sabre<\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">The cleanest of all the outdoors aircraft is a spotless ex-RAAF Avon-Sabre. In contrast, many of the Russian types, including those flown by the Czech Air Force, look as though they just returned from a busy grinding war deployment.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 2px double #666666; margin: 10px; vertical-align: top;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/kwd\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/tu104afw.jpg\" alt=\"tu104afw\" width=\"400\" height=\"193\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>One of the original Tupolev 104A airliners that helped to make the national airline the first all-jet passenger service in the world.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Not forgotten, in both inside and outside displays, are commercial aircraft flown by CSA and its predecessors. These include an 81-passenger Tupolev TU 104A, an aircraft that contributed to CSA becoming the first airline in the world flying regularly scheduled all-jet passenger transports.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Letecke Museum There is a little-known gem of an aviation museum less than 40 minutes by public transport from Prague. The Letecke Museum was founded in 1968 on historic Kbely, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":609,"featured_media":963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c50-maritime-museums","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/609"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5470,"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions\/5470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.navalofficer.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}