Cortina d'Ampezzo airport
| Cortina d'Ampezzo Airport Aeroporto di Cortina-Fiames “Sant'Anna” |
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| Characteristics | |||
| ICAO code | LIDI | ||
| IATA code | CDF | ||
| Coordinates | |||
| Height above MSL | 1200 m (3937 ft ) | ||
| Transport links | |||
| Distance from the city center | 4 km north of Cortina | ||
| Street | SS51 | ||
| Local transport | bus | ||
| Basic data | |||
| opening | 1962 | ||
| operator | Esperia Aviation Services | ||
| Start-and runway | |||
| 18/36 | 1380 m × 23 m asphalt closed |
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The airfield Cortina d'Ampezzo ( Italian Aeroporto di Cortina d'Ampezzo-Fiames “Sant'Anna” ) is located near Cortina d'Ampezzo in the northern Italian region of Veneto . The airfield, which was closed for a long time, has also been used commercially as a heliport since 2011 .
Location, infrastructure and use
The airfield is located in the middle of the Dolomites , in the upper Valle del Boite , between the Tofanen in the west and the Pomagagnon in the east, around four kilometers north of Cortina near the Fiames fraction , immediately west of Strada Statale 51 di Alemagna . The 1,300-meter-long asphalt runway 18/36, which is still in use, runs parallel to State Road 51 in a north-south direction . On the east side there is a small apron with small handling systems and a hangar.
The airfield was restored by Esperia Aviation Services . In 2011 it received a thirty-year concession to operate the airfield. Esperia offers air taxi services with its own helicopters , with flights to and from Venice and Milan as well as sightseeing flights in the Dolomites being the main focus. If necessary, flights to other Italian and foreign destinations are also operated. The municipality of Cortina does not allow heli-skiing . The airfield also serves as a base for rescue helicopters. A reactivation of the runway is currently not planned.
history
A first airfield was created in 1916 by the Italian military a few kilometers south of Cortina, near the village of Campo di Sotto. It was an advanced base that in the First World War the military airfield Belluno was assigned. Even this first airfield proved to be difficult to fly because of the special climatic conditions in Cortina. After the war, the Campo di Sotto airfield was abandoned.
In the summer of 1929 the airline Transadriatica tried to take up scheduled connections to Cortina, as the place in the Dolomites was not easy to reach for tourists. In those years, Transadriatica connected Venice with Munich and Vienna and wanted to plan Cortina-Campo di Sotto as a stopover. The Italian Ministry of Aviation agreed, but wanted to set up a new airfield at Fiames. Further development fizzled out, and so the project was dropped in 1931 for financial reasons. In 1942, the Cortina Tourist Board made another attempt to build an airfield for the period after the Second World War .
This attempt came back into consciousness on the occasion of the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina . In 1958, the Aeralpi company began to set up a runway along the road to Dobbiaco at the current location of the airfield near Fiames . The airfield was opened in 1962. Because of its location between two mountain ranges and the difficult wind conditions on site, only special types of aircraft and pilots experienced in mountain flying could be used here. Aeralpi initially used Pilatus Porter , Short Skyvan and Twin Otter and connected Cortina with Venice, Milan (directly or via Belluno or Asiago ) and Bozen . From 1967, Fiorenza de Bernardi, Italy's first female commercial pilot, was among the pilots . After a Twin Otter collided with a mountain near Fadalto in 1967 (see below under Incidents ) and in 1968 the main shareholder, Cesare Acquarone, was killed in Mexico , the Aeralpi stopped its flight operations. This also applied to Cortina airfield, which in the meantime had recorded a number of accidents with light aircraft . In 1975 Aeralpi started again and again connected Cortina with Milan, Venice and Bolzano. On May 31, 1976, a Cessna 206 of the Aeralpi crashed shortly after taking off from Cortina in very difficult wind conditions, killing the six occupants. The airfield was then permanently closed to fixed-wing aircraft . For a short time the Elidolomiti company operated there with its helicopters, then the airfield including the runway was used as a parking lot, especially for mobile homes . Several unsuccessful attempts to reactivate the airfield followed. In 1992, helicopters temporarily took off from Cortina-Fiames to film the film " Cliffhanger - Only the Strong Survive ", then it served as a parking lot for two more decades until Esperia succeeded in reactivating it as a heliport. During its inactive time, the airfield always kept both its ICAO code LIDI and its IATA code CDF, which is why it was also known as the “ ghost airport ” or aeroporto fantasma .
Incidents
- On March 11, 1967, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6-100 Twin Otter of the Italian Aeralpi ( aircraft registration I-CLAI) was flown into a mountain on the flight from Venice to its home airfield Cortina d'Ampezzo. During the alternative flight to Belluno airfield , which was continued according to visual flight rules , but in thick fog, the machine collided in a valley near the Fadalto Pass with the 1,763 meter high Col Visentin mountain. In this CFIT ( Controlled flight into terrain ) 5 of the 6 occupants were killed, both pilots and 2 of the 3 passengers. This was the first fatal accident with a DHC-6 Twin Otter and also the first total write-off.
Web links
- Esperia Aviation Services, airport operator and flight provider websites
- History of the airfields of Cortina
- Cortina Airfield on forgottenairfields.com
- Article in Corriere del Veneto on the reopening in 2011
- View of the airfield from the north
Individual evidence
- ^ Accident report DHC-6 I-CLAI , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on November 25, 2019.