Stamps That Tell a Story
Honouring the Košava, a classic design by Miloš Ilić and Adrian Kisovec.
This article first appeared in the April, 2003 issue of Gliding magazine. Temporal references have been retained as originally written. — Ed.
The day before the opening ceremony of the 13th World Soaring Championships in Vršac, the Yugoslav Post Office, Philatelic Services, issued a souvenir sheet with nine stamps of the same design. The postage stamp on the left shows the Košava (North Wind) two-seater high-performance sailplane.
Several stamps with a glider design were issued by this country in the past, so it is not surprising to see the Košava shown for this international competition. But one could question why a ‘vintage glider’ was chosen to help publicise the 1972 Internationals. No official documentation could be located, but here are some reasons which seem plausible.
The Yugoslav Flying Sports Organisation commissioned Miloš Ilić and Adrian Kisovec to design a sailplane similar in performance to the German Kranich II. The goal was a two- seater with good flying characteristics at high speeds and minimum sink at low speeds.
The resulting Košava sailplane was built by the Ikarus factory of conventional wood and fabric, and the prototype first flew in March 1953. According to the World Sailplanes, Volume II (see Resources, below) only two ships were produced. Thumbnails of the two pages covering the Košava are featured in the montage, above.
At the 1954 Internationals — at Camphill, England — this design, flown by Božidar Komac and Zvonimir Rain, took first place in the Two-Seater Class. In 1956, the Košava took second place at Saint-Yan, France.
The Košava was indeed a successful competitor in national and international competition and a tribute to excellent Yugoslavian sailplane design.
Plans for holding the 1965 Internationals in Yugoslavia were well along when disaster, a major earthquake, struck at Skopje in July, 1963. Having lost more than 1000 lives and with a city leveled, most upcoming international events were cancelled. England offered to take over and the 10th Internationals were staged at South Cerney.
Most likely the design of the postage stamp to be issued for the 1965 Internationals was already in the preliminary design stages. When Yugoslavia won the bid to hold the Internationals in 1972, the original stamp design was updated and made available for general distribution.
©2003, 2023 Simine Short
References
- The World’s Sailplanes, Volume 2 by OSTIV and available from AbeBooks.† — “256 pages; each craft described illustrated with photograph and scale drawings, as well as tables of data …”
- Sailplanes 1945–1965 by Martin Simons and available from AbeBooks.† — “Soaring, after 1945, acquired a hard commercial edge that had not been apparent before. Something was lost. Something else, the modern sailplane, was gained …”
†Also, make sure to check your local used book store for these titles — there’s a reasonable chance they’ll have them and it’s always best to shop local if you can!
Resources
- Stamps That Tell a Story: The Series — Catch up on your missing instalments of this excellent, informative series of articles presented previously in the New RCSD and of which this article is the most recent part.
Simine Short is an aviation researcher and historian. She has written more than 150 articles on the history of motorless flight and is published in several countries around the world as well as the United States. She is also the editor of the Bungee Cord, the quarterly publication of the Vintage Sailplane Association. Simine is currently working on a biography of aviation and soaring pioneer Octave Chanute.
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