The first day we started with driving from the Netherlands to Locarno/Magadino in the south of Switserland. We set off on sunday so that we wouldn't have to travel on a flying day. At our arrival in Magadino the REGA-helicopter just returned from a flight. We looke for a place to stay for the night and hoped it would be the same weather as it was on our arrival. Sadly when we opened the curtains we were entertained with the most spectacular thunderstorm which got trapped between the mountains and brought us a lot of rain.

During the storm 3 PC6's returned and landed but we decided to take a look on the other side of the mountain and hope for better weather but once again we were dissappointed. We first took a look at Stans/Buochs but only civilian PC12's were outside, next stop was Emmen flugplatz. Here we were surprised to see no less than 10 PC7's on the platform ready for departure but the didn't.We decided that maybe some activity would be going on at Alpnach so we drove to the spottersplace at the eastside of the runway but once again not much was going here aswell.

We had a very dissappoiting day and went looking for a place to stay in Stans. We got up early the next day and did a quick scan at Emmen and just arrived in time to see the first PC7's leave for Magadino and the PC6's which had brought the pilots,after that we drove back to Alpnach to catch some helicopters and during lunchbreak we drove to Stans to find a Slovanian PC9 and we just missed the Argentian PC12 but nevertheless a nice catch.

Jan Eenling 2009©