72 FLYPAST November 2018
Spotlight
Fieseler
Storch
I
t 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- 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.
At the controls for 2018’s historic
flight back to its former base
at Meiringen was pilot Cedric
Gitchenko, with me, Jürgen
Schelling, as co-pilot. The flight
was organised by the Friends of the
Fieseler Storch Society, located in
Oetwil am See, near Zürich. It’s the
first stage towards a bigger operation
next year, a bid to recreate that life-
saving flight to the glacier.
The group collects, restores and
operates these distinctive and
durable high-winged monoplanes;
it currently participates at air shows,
fly-ins and other events with three
airworthy Fieseler and Morane-
Saulnier-built machines. For now
though, one of its main aims is to
commemorate the spectacular Gauli
rescue in 2019.
the C-53 as it struck the ground.
Just one man on board was seriously
wounded, with a compound fracture
to the leg. The other 11 – three crew
and eight passengers – sustained
minor injuries. The pilots made an
emergency radio call, but wrongly
believed they had crash-landed
in the French Alps. The USAAF
immediately began one of the
biggest search and rescue missions
it had undertaken since the end of
World War Two. Their aircraft flew
over the Alps numerous times, but
initially found nothing.
Two days later, on November
21, the wreck was discovered on
the glacier in the Bernese Alps of
Switzerland. Swiss soldiers and
mountain rescue personnel
climbed from the valley below in a
bid to help the stranded survivors.
The search party reached the 12Distress call
On the morning of November 18,
1946, USAAF Douglas C-53D
Skytrooper 42-68846 took off from
Tulln an der Donau near Vienna,
Austria. The flight was bound for
Pisa in Italy, but never reached its
destination. Due to bad weather
the crew decided to avoid the most
direct route over the Alps, instead
heading around the mountain range
via Munich in Germany; Dijon,
Marseille and Strasbourg in France,
and then on to Pisa.
Unfortunately, the crew became
disoriented while flying in cloud.
Unsure of their position they
suddenly struck the Gauli Glacier
at an altitude of nearly 11,000ft
(3,350m). Thankfully the impact
wasn’t severe – it was a classic
‘controlled flight into terrain’
accident, with deep snow slowingHero of th
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
Right
Preparing for next
year’s historic
recreation of the
1946 rescue mission.
ALL VIA AUTHOR