Everyone has their moment
People arrive, enjoy themselves, do some flying and then disappear forever into the darkness. The setting stays the same: a hangar full of aeroplanes, grass, the view of the Little Carpathians and a blue sky. That moment may feel like eternity, but it never was.
The sequence of pilots on the home page is more than a portrait gallery. It is a picture of our heritage. Each brought something, each stepped forward for a moment, perhaps shone, and then disappeared.
This repeated itself across several generations.
Eventually the airfield itself came to an end. But photographs, documents, memories and traces remain of people for whom the airfield was their whole life.
That is also why this website exists: so the memories do not disappear. I imagine them as tiles that sometimes fit together.
If you have period photographs or documents relating to Vajnory airfield’s history, please do not hesitate to contact me at sabo.ivan1@gmail.com
Thank you
Disclaimer
This website about the origins and history of Vajnory airfield, centred on the activities of Bratislava’s Zväzarm Aeroclub, grew from surviving gonzoaviation.com material and conversations with dozens of veteran, senior and super-senior Aeroclub pilots who were willing to share their photo collections.
These days practically all the old hands are in the heavenly bar, drinking beer, reminiscing about their flying and laughing at our dogged attempts to run our lives.
AI-enhanced photo
I would like to offer belated thanks to Poky senior, whom I spent a year and a half persuading to lend me his photographs. Then he arrived with three suitcases of pictures, and everything became easy. Although I knew the Aeroclub’s old hands, without Poky’s support they would never have lent me their old albums.
I do not aim to document every detail of the airfield’s history; ultimately, that is not even possible.
I ran gonzoaviation.com for 11 years, accumulating around 240 photo albums containing 45.000 black-and-white photographs of flying in Czecho-Slovakia.
Use of AI
I made extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) in creating this website: finding information, enhancing photographs, turning old flight logbooks into an online database, transcribing articles from the period magazines Letectví, Slovenské krídla and Letecké noviny Bratislava, and finally designing the website itself. Where a photograph has been enhanced using AI, this is explicitly stated beneath it.
AI-enhanced photos have one unfortunate feature: once you start improving them this way, there is practically no going back. It is highly addictive, because the original photographs tend to look like grey smudges. The exception is when you suddenly notice the little pilot has six fingers on his right hand, or is starting to look rather a lot like a crocodile.
One final note: if, for whatever reason, you dislike the use of AI, please go back to Google and find another website. No worries mate