Kägiswil’s runway is making room for the Rega

Kägiswil airfield has reached one of those tidy Swiss dead ends where everyone says talks are still possible and the runway still goes nowhere. For about sixty years, sport aircraft have used the 780-metre strip in the municipality of Sarnen. Now civil flying is suspended, the lease has expired, and the old arrangement has run out of road in the most literal sense.

The immediate trigger is contractual, though the safety argument does the heavier lifting. Armasuisse had made the site available to the Flight Cooperative Obwalden, known as FGOW, under a building-rights contract. That agreement expired at the end of September, and the Federal Office of Civil Aviation says the airfield is now in a contractual vacuum. As a result, flying is no longer permitted for safety reasons; only ferry flights to another location remain allowed.

For the roughly 200 people who used the airfield, including hobby pilots and around 35 flight instructors, this is more than an administrative pause. FGOW had applied in May 2021 for a permanent civilian conversion of the airfield, but the landowners around the site did not agree, and the Federal Office of Civil Aviation declared the plan failed. A pending appeal before the Federal Administrative Court does not change that basic picture. Talks about a time-limited continuation are still under way, which is the polite Swiss way of saying the issue is not quite dead, merely badly wounded.

The other force shaping Kägiswil is the Rega, which plans to relocate its headquarters to the site. The rescue air service must leave Zurich Airport by the end of 2030, and in Kägiswil it intends to build a hangar with five helicopter parking stands and a multi-storey administrative building. To prepare the ground, profile poles are to be erected, and the Federal Office of Civil Aviation says the airfield will be fully shut down from 9 October until at least 20 November 2026.

Bernhard Müller, vice-president of FGOW, says the cooperative was caught off guard. He says it had assumed a new building-rights contract would begin at the start of October, which, according to him, had been the result of the last talks. The mood is tense, and with good reason: once the Rega project advances, there will be little space left for private flying in any meaningful sense.

The airfield itself has a longer history than the present dispute suggests. It was built during the Second World War as a Reduit airfield, first used by the army and later turned to civilian use. In 2013, the canton of Obwalden even wanted to buy the site from Armasuisse and convert most of it back into agricultural land. At the time, the canton planned to end flying by the end of 2016, arguing that continued operation no longer fit the zoning rules. That attempt failed after the association Pro Flugplatz mobilised resistance and voters rejected the purchase credit by more than 62 percent.

Now the canton is backing the Rega. Government councillor Marius Küchler says the new headquarters would bring a clear location advantage for Obwalden, along with 200 highly qualified jobs and investments of 100 million Swiss francs. For the region, that is a neat economic argument. For sport aviation, it reads more like a closing notice written in polite administrative prose.

Kägiswil is not the only place where leisure flying is being squeezed out. At EuroAirport Basel, it is also making way for a terminal expansion. The airport says sport flying will end there at the end of 2026, and the flight school in Basel will move to Bressaucourt in Jura at the beginning of 2027. The pattern is familiar enough: when land gets scarcer and institutions get louder, small aviation tends to lose the argument.

Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com