Airlines in Czechoslovakia
The original airline in Czechoslovakia was CSA (Ceskoslovenske Statni Aerolinie), which was founded on July 1923, and enjoyed a monopoly until 1927, when a rival airline called CLS (Ceskoslovenska Letecka Spolecnost) began operations. The first type of aircraft used by CSA was the Aero A-14, which could carry only one passenger. Twenty-three people were carried over the airline’s Prague-Bratislava route between 29 October 1923 (the opening day of service) and the end of the year.
By 1928, six Farman Goliath twelve-seat aircraft, built under license by Avia and Letov, were also in service, and in the three years that followed other types were added to airline’s fleet; including Aero A23’s, A32’s, and A35’s, de Havilland DH-50’s, a Junkers F.13 and a Ford Trimotor. By 1937, the airline’s equipment had been gradually modernized, and its inventory soon included three Savoia-Marchetti S.73’s, four Airspeed Envoy III’s, seven Fokker F.VIIb/3m’s, a Saro Cloud amphibian, one Avia-built Fokker F.IXd, seven Aero A35’s, one Aero A38, one Letov S218, four Letov S32’s, and a Caproni Ca.97. With these aircraft, CSA inaugurated a network of external routes from Prague to Paris, Brussels, Venice and Trieste via Klagenfurt and Bratislava, to Rome and Bucharest via Brno, and to Susak on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia via Bratislava.
CSA’s rival, CLS, although smaller, had more modern equipment in the shape of three Douglas DC-2’s and one DC-3, as well as two Fokker F.XVIII’s, six Fokker F.VIIb/3m’s, and an Avia A25. It also operated in co-operation with foreign airlines on external routes; on weekdays for example, it ran the “Blue Danube Air Express” from Rotterdam to Budapest via Prague and Vienna in conjunction with KLM. This service was extended to Croydon in 1938,from which CLS and KLM flew alternately to Budapest with their DC-3’s.
Other CLS facilities in the late 1930’s included a Prague-Marseille service via Munich, Zurich and Geneva, and other services to Vienna and Berlin in co-operation with the Austrian airline Austroflug and Deutsche Lufthansa.
Both CSA and CLS ceased operations in the spring of 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, and their resources were taken over by Lufthansa.
