Aladar Zsélyi

* Bussa or Csalár, December 12, 1883 – † Budapest, July 1914. / mechanical engineer, aircraft designer ; ; In the encyclopedias and on his tombstone in Csalár, Bussa is listed as his birthplace, but he lived in Csalár with his mother from a very young age, losing his father (who was called László Koch) very early. He completed his secondary school studies in Losonc, and from 1901 he studied at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the József Technical University in Budapest. Already as a student, he was keenly interested in the technical issues of aviation. Blériot's 1909 Budapest demonstration had a great influence on him and at that time he began designing an aircraft. He used many novel construction solutions, for example, the steering mechanism he developed enabled the machine to be moved in all directions. He also used spring landing gear and safety skids. He was the first in Hungary to start working with gas turbines and had high hopes for them in aviation. He was also a pioneer in Hungarian aviation literature. In 1912, in his paper entitled A nagy aeroplánok (The Great Airplanes), he also proposed the idea of a 34-seat passenger aircraft. He not only designed and built aircraft, but usually tested them himself. The first Hungarian-designed aircraft, the Zsélyi I, took to the skies on March 15, 1910. He built three aircraft under the name Zsélyi. He suffered several accidents, but escaped with minor or major injuries. However, his accident on April 15, 1914 had tragic consequences: the aircraft crashed to the ground due to an engine failure, and Zsélyi suffered an open fracture in his arm, which became infected and he died of tetanus at the age of barely 31. His earthly remains were buried in Csaláro. His memory is also preserved by the Zsélyi Aladár Society in Bussa. ; ; His main works: ; Principles of Aeronautical Technology, 1909 (German: Prinzipen der Flugtechnik, 1910), ; Mechanics, 1911, ; The Question of Large Aeroplanes (with Tibor Melczer), 1912, ; The Gas Turbine, Experiments on the Creation of a New Heat Engine, 1913.