After spending half a century in a museum, Fieseler Storch A-97 is airworthy and about to recreate a famous humanitarian mission. Jürgen Schelling reports
Fieseler Storch A-99 is being used to train pilots to land and take off from glaciers.
It is an extraordinary old-timer, a Fieseler Fi 156 C-3/trop Storch painted in the former colours of the Swiss Air Force. Getting airborne in June, in the livery it wore 70 years ago, the Storch flew from Dübendorf near Zürich, to Meiringen airport in the Swiss Alps. It was from the alpine aerodrome this aircraft – coded A-97 – set off on a rescue mission to the Gauli Glacier in Switzerland in November 1946. It later spent 50 years as an exhibit at the Swiss Museum of Transport (Verkehrshaus) in Luzern. By 2016 it had been restored to airworthiness in Poland.
