Locations of airports

There are various types of airport in Switzerland with various levels of importance. The Sectoral Aviation Infrastructure Plan (SIL) essentially differentiates between five categories of airport: national airports, regional airports, airfields, military airfields also used by civil aircraft, and heliports. Outside the scope of the SIL there are still mountain landing fields, hospital landing pads, water and winter landing places as well as take-off and landing grounds with no fixed buildings and equipment.

The role of national airports is to connect Switzerland to European and worldwide air-travel centres. They therefore have to provide an infrastructure which allows airport authorities to handle free-market traffic in competition with other European airports. If there is surplus capacity, it should be placed at the disposal of private air traffic.

Regional airports primarily handle flights connected with business, tourism and work. They supplement national airports as handlers of public air traffic with direct connections inside the country and abroad. In addition, they have a significant role in training and recreational air activities.

As far as the interests of military flight operations allow, individual military airfields also used by civil aircraft can be used. According to SIL, a relevant combined civil/military use would be if civil flights from military airfields accounted for more than 10% of military flight movements or if the annual number of civil flights exceeded 1,000.

Airfields primarily cover the requirements of private air traffic and training. As a whole, however, they are still in the public interest because they fulfil certain relief functions within the overall system of Swiss civil air traffic or they cater for business, tourism and work flights.

Along with a few helicopter pads at airports, heliports form the national network for helicopter flights. Public interest lies predominantly in rescue and emergency flights, work-related flights (e.g. in forestry or for avalanche protection) as well as providing services to areas with poor connection to road systems. Helicopters are also deployed for tourist transport.

Then come the mountain airfields, i.e. landing grounds outside airports, with no infrastructure, and which are more than 1100 m above sea level. On the one hand, they meet training and practice objectives and, on the other, they cater for tourism-related personal transport. In the context of the SIL the network of mountain airfields is currently undergoing a general review.