Wachthütte in Switzerland. Perfect day for flying, although I just wish there had been a bit of wind.

Have to Travel and Brought a Sailplane?

An homage to the RC soaring travel blog articles of years past.

Earlier in May, I had a somewhat last minute business trip to my company’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. Switzerland is kind of a slope soaring mecca. As a resident of flat central Indiana, I always enjoy trying to get some RC slope soaring in whenever I am near a place with actual slopes. With the goal of getting some flying in after the business trip portion I packed my trusty Chinook in my carry on luggage.

Any good flying trip starts with some research. First I needed to find out what the laws are in Switzerland for RC flying. I won’t bore everyone here with my findings but my research lead me to believe that I would be okay as long as I was flying away from airports, not flying at a place where RC sailplanes are prohibited, and flying models under 500g. Above 500g requires some sort of insurance which I’m sure I could have acquired had I been flying in a contest or something with a bigger model. My read is flying is relatively unrestricted. After researching the laws the next item of business was to scope out some possible places to fly.

Although Switzerland pretty much looks like one continuous postcard that you could throw a rock in any direction and find a suitable place to fly it always makes sense to check with the locals and have a plan for where to fly. To that end before my trip I reached out to Reto Fiolka, a well known pilot in the RC soaring community and former Switzerland resident. He gave me some suggestions for places to fly given where I was going to be staying while working and where my wife and I would be traveling after the work portion of the trip. My other resource was Slople.com (see Resources below), a great resource although you do have to be a bit careful because some of the flying site information can be dated.

The post-work part of the trip took us to Lausanne, Interlaken and Bern. Sunday the May 15th in Bern was the best opening to fly. Unfortunately when I looked at the weather forecast for that day there wasn’t a prediction of a lot of wind. Or really any wind. I ended up choosing to take a chance on a flying site listed on Slople.com as Wachthütte near the small town of Krauchthal northeast of Bern, that would be relatively on the route we were driving toward the end of that day.

The red pin is the place where I flew.

The drive to the slope from Bern was picturesque although as we got closer to the slope the small farm roads started to concern my wife a bit. The text on the Slople.com entry for this field is below:

Sehr gut bei Bise! Zufahrt mit dem Auto möglich. Parkplätze sind im Wald vorhanden.

That roughly translates to say that access by car is possible and that parking is possible in the forest. Although the roads were a bit narrow and at points we were driving on rock roads we were able to drive to a nice little wooded area with a few pull offs that was right at the top of the slope. As we were getting near the slope I spotted the all too familiar site to me of a RC sailplane zipping around. That also helped assure me that the navigation instructions the phone was giving us was correct. We parked and I stepped out and introduced myself to the man flying the plane (he had just landed) and met a nice fellow pilot named Heinz.

Heinz and his scratch-built hotliner.

Although my German skills have atrophied from when they were at their peak during my school years, Heinz and I were able to communicate well enough for me to learn that this was his second time at this particular flying site and that his model was a scratch built hotliner. That was a good choice of model given the lack of wind. I didn’t catch Heinz’s last name or his contact info, so Heinz if you are reading this article drop me a line sometime and maybe next time I am in Switzerland we can fly together again.

The author with his trusty well travelled Chinook.

I did end up assembling my Chinook and getting a few flights in but with the lack of really any wind to speak of flights were pretty short. That didn’t make for a particularly exciting first flying session in Switzerland but I do expect to make future trips to Switzerland for business and will make future attempts at flying. Maybe I’ll even find a way to attend a contest.

©2022 Ryan Woebkenberg

Resources

• Slople.com — Scrollable map of RC slopes with GPS coordinates and information about the flying site.

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