Jan Wnęk was a Polish carver of religious statues who is claimed to have constructed and flown a glider in the 1860s, predating the flights of Otto Lilienthal. There is a speculative "reconstruction" of Wnek's glider in the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków.
Jan Wnek was born in the village of Kaczówka near Dąbrowa Tarnowska. He was the son of a serf and received no formal education., but was trained as a carpenter. Encouraged by a local priest, Father Stanislaw Morgenstern, Wnęk became a prolific sculptor in wood and stone for churches and cemeteries in Kraków and Odporyszów. The angels he sculpted are described as having wings of "exceptional beauty". He also possessed an instinctive talent for mechanics and improved some contemporary agricultural machinery, and acted in village plays.
There is no contemporary written description of the glider and the reconstruction in the Kraków Museum of Ethnography is entirely speculative. The claims for his flights are based on a local oral tradition.