The aviation world is full of small private airports, some in difficult-to-reach places. Those airports tend to draw mostly small general aviation planes like your standard Cessna 172s and Piper PA-28s, but this takeoff and landing from a tiny grass strip in the Italian Alps is apparently home to a high-performance Pilatus PC-12. Locher Airfield is a private airstrip that is just a couple of valleys away from Austria in the Alps and the combination of single-approach/departure grass strip and turboprop executive plans there makes for strange bedfellows.
The grass strip is perched on a hill and the taxiway to and from the strip looks more like a bike path than a proper taxiway. And like other famously remote mountain airports like Lukla in Nepal and Paro in Bhutan, this one sure doesn’t look like it has any contingency for a missed approach. It’s either get it right or carve a chunk out of the mountains that line both sides of the approach. Still, the Pilatus, aided by a downhill run, doesn’t seem to have any difficulty finding enough speed to take off, nor does it have trouble whoaing down headed back up the hill on landing.
Still, as far as coming and going from an airport, it’s hard to imagine anything a whole lot more puckering.
Wicked strip , beautiful plane . But I prefer the pickup truck version porter or a helio courier