Forbes Serbia journalists look from the window at the street of Tadije Sondermajera, the first pilot and the first director of the first Yugoslav air transport company, which was founded in June 1927 as Aeroput Air Transport Company.
JAT or Yugoslav Air Transport, changed its name to Jat airways in 2003 and disappeared completely a decade later. It was created on April 1st, 1947, by the decree of the then Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FNRJ).
And no matter how much it seemed that JAT was a symbol of the renewal of air traffic after the Second World War, the truth is that Aeroput was a joint-stock company, in accordance with the then capitalist system of Yugoslavia between the two wars, and JAT was a state enterprise that would later grow into one of the most important symbols of Tito of Yugoslavia.
Both the internal and external policy of the SFRY seemed to be mirrored precisely through JAT, whose business ventures and results often attracted the attention of foreigners.
Non-aligned country, non-aligned airline
Phil Tiemeyer, from the history department of the University of Philadelphia, was also interested in JAT, and in a book intended for airlines, he considers the case of JAT precisely as a “non-aligned airline” that swam very well in the decades of the Cold War.
“The more I remember my childhood, growing up in the United States (U.S)., I saw JAT planes when I traveled to New York, Chicago… Enough to know that there is a connection between Belgrade and the rest of the world, including the U.S., and that interest was reawakened because of the events of the 1990s,” Tiemeyer once said to a Voice of America reporter.
14 daily flights to the U.S.
Namely, shortly after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the USSR in 1948, JAT established air traffic with Switzerland, and then with the U.S., but not direct flights, but via parts of Germany that were under American patronage. JAT’s first flight to the U.S. was organized in 1970, and by 1989 there would be as many as 14 daily flights to the U.S., it is written in the JAT monograph, written on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of its establishment by the authors Cedomir Janic and Jovo Simisicand named ”More than flying”.
War and sanctions
The war, the breakup of the joint state and the sanctions imposed on FR Yugoslavia also brought JAT into business problems. The company, which was a symbol of the policy of non-alignment and the position of the former state during the Cold War period, lost both the internal and external markets. Namely, traffic within SFRY was organized through 16 airports, so JAT lost 40 percent of its passenger potential due to the collapse of the state.
The company was changed into a public company in 1992, and the losses that accumulated during the years of war and sanctions imposed by the FRY made it impossible for this company to resolve issues and improve the situation.
Today, the former symbol of Yugoslavia has been fully returned under the auspices of the state. The adventure with the strategic partner ended with a bill of at least 64 billion dinars of taxpayers’ money. It is a national airline that does not have its own planes. And maybe it doesn’t even have a future, Forbes writes.
E.Dz.
