Images20

Military air show guests, Novi Sad Airfield, 1913

Archduke Joseph talks with an aviator beside a biplane

12 May 1913

Archduke Joseph August at the Novi Sad Aviation Days

12 May 1913

Béla Matkovits, Archduke Joseph and Officers in a Field

12 May 1913

Béla Matkovits and Archduke Joseph beside an aircraft

12 May 1913

A Woman in White Beside Archduke Joseph at the Hangars, Novi Sad

12 May 1913

Archduke Joseph reads a document with a member of his entourage

12 May 1913

A Biplane in Its Hangar, Novi Sad

1917

An Aeroplane Inside an Open Hangar

1917

Airport hangars, Novi Sad Airfield, 1919

A welcome arch of flags and greenery

around 1930

Royal Yugoslav Air Force Escadrille

1933

Collapsed airfield building after the bombing of Novi Sad

1941

Soldiers With a Damaged Breguet 19 at Novi Sad Airport, 1941

1941

Wrecked biplanes inside a bombed hangar at the Novi Sad airfield

1941

Aircraft Wreckage in the Bombed Hangar

1941

A Soldier Beside the Wreckage of a Breguet 19, Novi Sad Airport, 1941

1941

Ruined hangar with a collapsed canopy at the bombed Novi Sad airfield

1941

Students of the Novi Sad Aircraft Mechanic School, 1943

1943

About this place

Novi Sad's military airfield lay on the western edge of the city, on the flat ground at Sajlovo that later took the name Jugovićevo. The city ceded the land in 1912 at the request of the Austro-Hungarian general staff and the field opened with a flying meeting in May 1913, at first no more than grass strips and eleven wooden hangars, with brick hangars, workshops and barracks following in 1916. A Serbian squadron flew in from France in November 1918, and for the next two decades the field was the centre of military aviation in the new Yugoslav state, home of the first pilot school, of training schools for reserve officers, observers and mechanics, and of the air force command until it moved to Zemun in 1936; it was renamed in 1927 after the aviation officer Jovan Jugović. German bombers struck it in April 1941, the occupiers laid an 800 metre concrete runway, and after the war the field lost its purpose as the city grew over it, leaving Jugovićevo as the name of a residential district.