Challenging Airports Courchevel, France (LFLJ)

If we’ve learned anything over the millennia, it has to be that the human spirit has an innate and perpetual quest for achievement. We rose from our knuckles to walk on two feet. We discovered how to make fire and how the wheel could ease our burdens. Eventually, we would build incredible machines that would make the horse obsolete and take to the skies like birds.

Short final to Courchevel runway 22 shows the steep runway and formidable terrain beyond. (Photo courtesy of Captain Siegfried Lenz).

For all of those leaps forward there seemed to be no question as to why we would want to do those things. As for carving a small airport out of the side of the French Alps in an impossibly difficult place to operate aerial machinery - we can only scratch our heads and say “because we can!”  And thus was born Courchevel ‘altiport’ in the rugged skiing landscape of the rich and famous.

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