Czech Airlines (ČSA), one of the five oldest airlines in the world, ended its services after the October 26 flight bearing an iconic OK code, OK767, landed in Prague in the evening.
Czech Airlines is now incorporated into local operator Smartwings, which plans to maintain the ČSA logo and colours on the remaining four Czech Airlines planes.
The last flight was cheered by a crowd of onlookers at Prague’s Václav Havel Airport and one of Czech Airlines’s retired captains, Miloš Kvapil, told Czech Television (ČT) that “it hurts”, recalling that he spent about forty years with the company, describing it as “fantastic times, even during communism”.
Kvapil, who wrote a book about Czech Airlines (loosely translatable as “Long Distance – Golden Era of ČSA”), said that he wouldn’t come to the airport to see the last flight as “it makes no sense” and that he will stay home with his memories.
Czech Airlines was founded as Czechoslovak Airlines on October 6, 1923, during the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, and was the oldest operating airline company after KLM, Avianca, Qantas and Aeroflot. It was also one of the first companies in the world to introduce jet aircraft. It has been known as Czech Airlines since 1995 following the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993.
One of the September episodes of ČT’s investigative programme Reportéři ČT recalled the era of the former social democratic minister of defence and current general manager of football side SK Slavia Prague, Jaroslav Tvrdík, in the mid-2000s as the beginning of the fall of the iconic company.
Under Tvrdík‘s watch, Czech Airlines fell into the red and began selling off its property. The era is also remembered for large contracts with local branches of international consulting and auditing companies such as Deloitte and McKinsey, while the company struggled to respond to changes in the international flight market, including the rise of low-cost airlines.
Tvrdík “was a man who probably knew nothing about the airline business,” former Czech Airlines president and Tvrdík’s predecessor Miroslav Kůla was quoted as saying by ČT in September, adding self-critically that he could have underestimated the Czech Airlines situation before the arrival of Tvrdík’s management, when the company still had strong cashflow with “CZK1.5bn [€60mn] in its account”.
Czech Airlines was sold to Korean Air in 2013, and after the failed attempt to revive the company, Smartwing Group took over in 2017. Czech Airlines filed for insolvency following the 2020 Covid-19 year.