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CELEBRATION OF 100 YEARS OF AVIATION IN THE CZECHLANDS WITH NOVODVORSKÁ PLAZA THROUGHOUT SEPTEMBER

Please visit a unique exhibition of aviation history.
 
The opening ceremony starts in the mall gallery at 5 p.m. on 1 September 2010.

A balloon will take off from the mall car park in the event of a good wind.
An accompanying program is ready in the mall gallery on Wednesdays.

Fly with Novodvorská Plaza and win a balloon flight in an on-line game called the Flyer!


The Novodvorská Plaza Mall’s exhibition joins in commemorations of this year’s anniversary of one hundred years since the first flight of Jan Kašpar, a Czech aviator. Aviation is perhaps the best example of how advances in technology guide progress.

Parachuting, paragliding, ultra-light planes, reinstated balloons and minuscule helicopters now powered by electromotors and exhibited by Novodvorská Plaza show you the direction of progress.

We believe a short tour of the exhibition will introduce you to what the present era has to offer.
Whereas airplanes actually appeared in the Czechlands exactly 100 years ago for the first time, balloons were there a bit earlier. Seven years after the Montgolfier brothers showed their invention to Louis XVI in Paris, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a French balloonist who already was famous at the time, arrived in Prague in the autumn of 1790. He brought with him a large balloon of 90,000 cubic feet, which required 4,600 cubits of a multicolored taffeta. He really inflated it in a forest called Stromovka in Prague on 31 October to take off at around 5 p.m. With him took off the well educated Count Joachim von Sternberg, a member of the Czech Society of Sciences, who went so far as to take with him scientific instruments to carry out various measurements while in flight. They ascended to an altitude of almost 2,000 meters and landed, safe and sound, in fields near the village of Bubeneč. As a result, balloonists should celebrate a 220th anniversary.

The Balloon Club of Prague (established on 8 December 1965) managed to re-establish modern balloonist traditions. Assisted by Polish tutors, its members constructed the first post war Czechoslovak gas balloon OK 7000 named Praga 68, took off in the balloon from the plain of Letná on 23 June 1968 for the first time and trained a number of excellent pilots. We could celebrate the 45th anniversary of the oldest balloon club in the Czechlands there. And other balloon enthusiasts gradually took up where the club left off. Today, one of the world’s largest producers of hot air balloons is present in the Czech Republic.

A number of balloons hover safely in the sky and it is not very difficult to savor the beautiful experience of flying in a hot air balloon.

Come and see the exhibition that wants to let you know more of these things. Come and touch a real balloon, plane or parachute, get to know a little bit of history and the modern times and why things are the way they are, talk to interesting people and listen to “stories from behind the scenes.” Your experience of being in the air will be all the stronger.

Program

1 September
5 p.m. – Opening ceremony, preparations for the takeoff of a balloon, lecture about the history of aviation in the Czechlands for visitors, film presentation and a children’s corner

8 September
5 p.m. – Private flying lecture and various levels of aviation, such as ultralight planes and paragliding.
Lecturer: Jan Brskovský, President, LAA, and his team

15 September
5 p.m. – General aviation, sports flying, rescue service, transportation and astronautics
Lecturer: Ing. Jiří Kobrle, Ing. Ladislav Mika and O. Pelčák

22 September
5 p.m. – Flying in a balloon and a discussion with balloonists
Hosted by: Ing. V. Lacina; Guests: J. Hozák, J. Pešl, V. Hlavatý and D. Línek; showing of the film Third Dimension

Program subject to change.
A children’s corner on Wednesday afternoons.