T hat 23 rd June 2016, at precisely 8:08am, Captain Davor Mišeljić lifted his Airbus A330 into the air above Belgrade. This flying giant, with more than 250 passengers, landed af- ter nine and a half hours at JFK Airport, thereby officially marking the opening of a direct line from Belgrade to New York af- ter a break of nearly a quarter of a century. The plane with the flight code JU 500, under the celebrated name Nikola Tesla , was received at this New York airport with water cannons as a welcome gesture, while it was
also greeted with an electronic billboard that read “JFK Airport welcomes Air Serbia”. From then until today, Air Serbia has become and remained the only airline from Southeast Eu- rope to offer direct transatlantic flights to the U.S., carrying tens of thousands of satisfied guests for whom relatives and friends are no longer distant in distant America. The plane that entered into histo- ry by flying to this destination is the first wide-bodied aircraft for regular interconti- nental traffic between the Balkans and the U.S., as well as being the largest plane in
the Air Serbia fleet, with 254 seats – 236 in economy class and 18 in business class. It arrived in Belgrade in May last year and was flown from Abu Dhabi by the same captain who would pilot it on its first flight to New York, Davor Mišeljić, Air Serbia’s former chief operations officer. At Belgrade’s Niko- la Tesla Airport, Mišeljić previously met the oldest living JAT pilot, the legendary Avram Avramović (94), who was inscribed in the an- nals of Serbian aviation history as the man who brought the first aircraft for intercon- tinental flights, the Boeing B707, into the
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