Aviation Museum Kbely

We had a whole day to fill after the Bruce Springsteen show fell trough on our Prague Trip in the spring of 2024. We soon came up with an alternative: a visit to the aviation museum Kbely. They have a plethora of Warshaw Pact-designed aircraft on display. Planes we don’t see often in European and US museums. It was well worth the visit.

Their shiny Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 Fagot was a beauty. This Korean War era plane outclassed many of the USAF fighters in the skies over Korea until the US introduced the F-86 Sabre.

The museum also had quite a few Cold War era aircraft. This Sukhoi SU-22M4 is a typical example of that period. It served as a fighter-bomber from the mid 1960’s until the late 1990’s with many air forces of the former Warshaw Pact as well as countries in the Arab world.

Their collection spanned many decades of military aviation. Mainly by Soviet and Czech design from as early as the 1920’s all the way to the 2nd World War and the Cold War era. Both fixed wing aircraft and helicopters.

Another highlight was the Messerschmitt Me 262. It was the 1st time I saw that plane in real life. The Me 262 was the world’s 1st jet powered fighter. A German design that flew with the Czechoslovak Air Force until 1951.

We looked in awe at the reentry capsule of the Sojuz 28 spaceship. It is not every day, you get to see a Russian-built spacecraft. Sojuz 28 launched on March 2nd, 1978 with cosmonauts Alexey Gubarev and Vladimír Remek–a Czechoslovak national on board. It returned to Earth 8 days later. It struck us the most how tiny the capsule is. We could not imagine fitting 2 people in it for 8 whole days.