Departure
93%
vs 95% ▼ 2
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Raron Airfield lies in the Rhone valley of the Canton of Valais, on the site of a former Swiss military air base built into the mountainside during the Second World War. Today it survives as a small civilian airfield with a single hard-surfaced runway, notable chiefly for its dramatic history as a Swiss Redoubt base and its continuing use by Air Zermatt.
Raron Airfield (ICAO: LSTA) sits at Raron in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland, on the site of a former Swiss military air base (ICAO: LSMN) that once housed cavern hangars cut into the surrounding mountainside. The field shares its site with the Raron operation of Air Zermatt (ICAO: LSER), and its combination of Alpine setting, wartime origins and short runway make it a distinctive destination for a visiting VFR pilot.
The airfield is located at Raron in the Rhone valley, in the Canton of Valais, roughly 75 kilometres south-southeast of Berne. It occupies the site of the former Swiss military air base Raron.
Raron has a single physical runway, 10/28, orientated broadly east-west along the Rhone valley. The surface is hard and the runway is lit. Recorded lengths are 2256 feet for runway 10 and 2530 feet for runway 28. Field elevation is 2090 feet.
No communications frequencies are published for Raron Airfield. There is no ILS or other instrument approach aid at the field. The site is also used by Air Zermatt under its own ICAO identifier, LSER, for its Raron operation.
Raron began life as a Swiss military air base, opening in October 1942 as one of the airfields built to support the Swiss Redoubt defensive strategy, complete with cavern hangars excavated into the flank of the surrounding mountain. Civilian flying began at the field from 1977, and the Swiss military formally released the base in 1995. Around the turn of the millennium the eastern side of the airfield was pressed into service as an offloading station for excavation material from the Lötschberg Base Tunnel, part of the Neue Eisenbahn-Alpentransversale (NEAT) project, which also saw the runway shortened considerably from its original length of 2400 by 40 metres. On 30 January 2002 the Swiss Federal Council placed Raron on the official list of civilian airfields, though only with this reduced runway. The airfield's future was threatened in January 2011 when the local community proposed closing it to make way for a scientific-economic zone; a petition and a federal appeal overturned that decision. The Canton of Valais reaffirmed Raron's status as a civilian airfield for the region in November 2011, and the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (Bundesamt für Zivilluftfahrt, BAZL) confirmed this status again in May 2012.
Raron remains a small civilian airfield in the Rhone valley, sharing its site with the Raron base of Air Zermatt. Its runway is considerably shorter than in its military-era configuration, a legacy of the tunnel-excavation works that once used the site as an offloading point. It continues to operate under its confirmed civilian status following the rulings of the Canton of Valais and the Federal Office of Civil Aviation.