A family flight school, teaching people to fly since 1995

How it started

Most of us have wanted, at least once, to lift off the ground and feel what that is like. For me the idea never went away. It began with teaching my father's model aeroplanes to fly and jumping off the barn door holding an umbrella. It turned serious at fifteen, when I flew in an AN-2 for the first time and shortly afterwards jumped out of one with a parachute from six hundred metres. There was no going back after that.

Not long after, a friend sold me a hang glider for fifteen hundred crowns, threw in a manual called People with Bats' Wings, and I ran off the hill at Vestec with the wing on my back. That moment when you genuinely leave the ground is not something you forget. I started driving to hills all over the country with the glider strapped to the roof of my Trabant, trying each time to stay up a little longer and a little higher. Powered trikes came next, and with them the chance to fly two-up and share it with somebody else.

From a hobby to a profession — and a family trade

Before long I was competing, gathering experience abroad and flying for the national team. Once I had passed the instructor exams I started handing the enthusiasm on to new pilots. In 2000 I flew over an eight-thousand-metre peak in Nepal as part of the Annapurna High expedition, on a specially modified powered trike.

Aeroplane training followed the trikes. The flying passed to my son Matouš, who climbed onto a trike as a student pilot shortly after his fifteenth birthday and was soon flying aeroplanes too. He now flies for the national team, has won the European championship in Lithuania and teaches here as an instructor. Between us we help other people get their own flying started.