SOKO
| Aeronautical industry | |
| Industry | Aircraft production |
| Founded | 1950 |
| Headquarters | Mostar, Yugoslavia |
| Products | fighters, bombers, trainers |
Soko (Cyrillic: Соко) was an Yugoslav aircraft manufacturer based in Mostar, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina. The company was responsible for the production of many military aircraft for the Yugoslav Air Force.
It was created in 1950 by the relocation of the aircraft factory section of Ikarus company from Zemun, SR Serbia. Officially founded as "Preduzeće Soko" (Soko corporation, Soko meaning Falcon in Serbian), soon after it will be renamed to "Soko Vazduhoplovna Industrija, RO Vazduhoplovstvo" (Soko aeronautical industry, RO aeronautics). Its first director was Yugoslav People's Army colonel Ivan Sert. The following directors of the company were engineers Miljenko Pješčić and Tomislav Mirić. The serial manufacture of numerous types of aircraft was projected by the Aeronautical Technical Institute in Belgrade. Besides aircraft, SOKO also produced helicopters under licence. Located in the vicinity of Mostar, it mostly used the Mostar Airport for test flights.
By the 1980s SOKO was working on Novi Avion which was a project of a 4th-generation, supersonic multi-role fighter intended to supply the Yugoslav Air Force with domestically built modern fighters. The production was planned to begin in 1991 however the start of the Yugoslav wars and the international embargo caused the project to be cancelled. In the early 1990s the factory ceased aircraft production. The facilities were partially dismantled and relocated to Serbia to the Utva Aircraft Industry in Pančevo which had already been working closely with SOKO in the manufacturing of Orao and Super Galeb.
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