Departure
97%
vs 95% ▲ 1
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Graz Airport (LOWG) is Austria's principal airport for the southern part of the country, lying a few miles south of Graz in Styria and serving scheduled, charter and military traffic from a single long hard-surfaced runway supplemented by two grass strips. It is a fully controlled aerodrome with an instrument approach, radar approach service and a long and varied aviation history stretching back to 1913, making it an interesting destination for a simulator pilot as much for its infrastructure as for its story.
Graz Airport, known locally as Flughafen Graz, is a large, internationally connected aerodrome operated by Flughafen Graz Betriebs GmbH on behalf of Holding Graz. It sits close to the village of Abtissendorf in Feldkirchen municipality and the Thalerhof area of Kalsdorf, just south of the city of Graz itself. For a VFR or IFR visitor in the simulator it offers a genuine mix of scheduled airline movements, general aviation, and a military-civilian character, all within a compact and well-organised airfield.
The airport lies about 5 nautical miles (roughly 9 kilometres) south of Graz city centre, spanning the municipalities of Feldkirchen and Kalsdorf in Styria. It is a controlled aerodrome, with an approach frequency and tower frequency in operation, indicating that arriving and departing traffic operates within controlled airspace around the field rather than in an open FIR environment. The field is tagged as a joint customs and military-civilian facility, reflecting continued use by both civil airline traffic and military units alongside general aviation.
Graz has one main hard-surfaced runway pair, 16C/34C, of Grade H construction and lit, with the 34C threshold offering an ILS approach; the runway measures 9831 ft on the 34C alignment and 8977 ft on the 16C alignment. Two shorter grass runway pairs are also available: 17R/35L at 2492 ft and 17L/35R at 2087 ft, both unlit grass strips likely used by light aircraft and training traffic rather than airline operations.
Pilots should expect to work Graz Approach on 119.3 MHz and Graz Tower on 118.2 MHz, with the automatic terminal information service broadcast on 126.125 MHz. The main runway, 34C, is equipped with an ILS, giving straightforward instrument arrivals from the north; no other precision approach is noted for the reciprocal or grass runways.
Graz Airport's origins date to 1913, when construction of a grass runway and the first hangars began, with the first flight recorded in 1914. During the First World War the site also served as the Thalerhof internment camp, administered under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of Franz Joseph I and later Charles I. Austria's first domestic passenger route, linking Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt, began in 1925, and in 1930 the Yugoslav carrier Aeroput extended a Belgrade-Vienna service to call at Zagreb and Graz. A dedicated terminal building followed from 1937 as passenger numbers grew. After the Second World War, Austria was barred from operating military or civil aircraft until 1951, when Austrian airspace reopened and a new 1,500 metre concrete runway was built at Graz; this was extended to 2,000 metres in 1962. The airport's first international scheduled service, to Frankfurt, began in 1966, prompting a further runway extension to 2,500 metres in 1969 and a new terminal building. The airfield hosted a visit by Concorde in 1981 and by a Boeing 747 for its 70th anniversary in 1984. A further terminal was completed in 1994, ahead of the runway's final extension to 3,000 metres in 1998. Passenger growth through the early 2000s led to another terminal extension in 2003 and a second terminal building in 2005. More recent history includes the arrival of Swiss International Air Lines services to Zurich and Turkish Airlines to Istanbul in 2015, and a major expansion by Eurowings, which established an operating base at Graz from 2023 with nine new routes.
Graz today functions as a full international airport handling scheduled and charter services from carriers including Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa, Swiss International Air Lines, Eurowings, Air Dolomiti, Pegasus Airlines, SunExpress and BA Euroflyer, alongside seasonal leisure routes to destinations such as Palma de Mallorca, Antalya and various Greek islands. The apron can accommodate aircraft up to Boeing 747 or An-124 size, using mobile stairways rather than jet bridges, and the field retains cargo handling facilities for charter freight movements, including time-critical automotive parts traffic. Its joint customs and military-civilian designation reflects ongoing shared use of the airfield beyond purely commercial aviation.