Museum in Mladá Boleslav creates replica of interwar years aircraft
The Metoděj Vlach Aviation Museum in Mladá Boleslav has a new exhibit: a replica of the Kuňkadlo sport aircraft. It was built by designer Juraj Tinka and donated to the museum. The original aircraft was constructed 100 years ago by brothers Bohumil and Vladimír Šimůnek in 1925.
The Šimůnek brothers became interested in aviation at the very beginning of the First World War, initially focusing on building model aircraft. After the war, they studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Alongside their studies, they completed practical training at the Avia company, where Pavel Beneš and Miroslav Hajn were then working as chief designers.
Inspired by this engineering environment, the brothers decided to design and build their own light aircraft. It was conceived as a single-seat, all-wood, high-wing airplane with an open cockpit.
The aircraft earned the nickname "kuňkadlo" (referring to frogs croaking) because of the sounds its engine makes. Vladimír Handlík, director of the Metoděj Vlach Aviation Museum in Mladá Boleslav, explains the story behind the nickname to Czech Radio:
"Because Bohuslav and Vladimír Šimůnek, who built it as university students almost a century ago, put in an engine that made such strange noises when it was running, such croaking sounds, that people started calling it kuňkadlo as a joke."
The aircraft's engine originally came from a lawnmower, Handlík explains:
"Juraj Tinka, the aircraft's designer, used this engine in a whole range of aircraft because it provides sufficient power for light aircraft and has very low fuel consumption."
The original aircraft is on display at the National Technical Museum. The replica, located in Mladá Boleslav, flies at a speed of 90 km/h and can stay in the air for approximately four hours. The empty aircraft weighs 100 kilograms and can carry a pilot weighing up to 80 kilograms.
"It's also difficult to climb into. You have to stretch under the wing and crawl in. It's a bit of a sporting feat," laughs the museum director.
Michal Plavec from the National Technical Museum has more details about the aircraft:
“I work as a curator of the aviation collection. Kuňkadlo, as it is originally called, is displayed in the transport hall of the National Technical Museum. The whole aircraft began to take shape in 1925 in Veselí nad Lužnicí, where the Šimůnek family came from. Their uncle used to go and watch them, and Bohuslav Šimůnek later wrote, several years afterward, that they were completely terrified, because he was hammering the tail assembly together with a pipe.”
The aircraft entered the collections of today’s National Technical Museum directly from its owners before the Second World War.
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