Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: Vaclav Havel

Although to the best of my knowledge this is CSA's only wide-body, heavy jet right now, it has made a certain amount of headlines since its introduction early last year. I was hoping they would use it for flights to Kennedy, like they did with their earlier heavy jets, but so far I haven't had my wish. On this trip, which descended into a fiasco almost immediately, I had to fly via Frankfurt and Toronto, and couldn't get any airline to fly more directly to Syracuse or Kennedy.

This is the new sign for Vaclav Havel, formerly Ruzyne, airport.

This was my first photo of Ruzyne Airport after its name change to Vaclav Havel soon after the former president's death in 2011. You can just barely see the changed lettering on Terminal 2. Correct me if I'm wrong on the Terminal, but I could not have been in Terminal 1 as my first flight wouldn't be out of the Schengen area.

This display of candles was isolated from the rest, depicting a heart and his birth and death years, which were 1936-2011. My sense is that before the candles got moved around, it was easier to read.

This was further down the square, at the Jan Palac/Jan Zajic memorial, one of two on the square (the other is a cross embedded in the sidewalk in front of the Narodni Muzeum).

A giant photo of Havel was prepared on short notice to hang from the Narodni Muzeum as part of the remembrance. There wasn't any dedicated memorial to Havel yet, since he had only just died, so everything had to be makeshift, as in this photo, and the adaptation of the Vaclav I and Palach/Zajic memorials for the purpose. Almost immediately, however, proceedings were begun to rename Prague's Ruzyne Airport to Letiste Vaclava Havla.

This is a wider shot, taken from the front of the statue instead of the left side as before.

This was what I found upon my return to Prague. Vaclav Havel, the former President and revolutionary, had died while I was away. This display of candles, cards, and so on, most of them around the older Svaty Vaclav (St. Wenceslas) statue, stayed up longer than planned, largely due to public outcry against government plans to dismantle it by New Year's Eve (remembering national heroes is a downer when people are on a drinking binge). If I'm remembering correctly, some elements of it were still up when I got back from my New Year's vacation to Wales.