ALPINE PILOT

Landing an aeroplane high in the rarefied air of the Swiss Alps on a hump of snow only twenty - five yards wide, with a slope of thirty to forty degrees, framed by couloirs and crevasses and with a terrace forty yards ahead of touch down, can only described as a pilot's nightmare. To Hermann Geiger it was a challenge in a daily job of work, carrying supplies for the building of the Rossier hut on the Dent Blanche. To land in the white solitude of the Alps the touch down must succeed first time ; the short " runway " of snow is usually closed with rocks and insurmountable walls of ice, the scenery is firmly planted, and the glare of the snow falsifies distances and flattens out relief. If you damage the plane on landing, there are no mechanics, no ambulances, no help. Only a wilderness of icy mountains.

( ... ) Hermann Geiger was fascinated from his early years by the possibilities of using an aeroplane in the Swiss mountains. ( ... ) After years of experience in flying gliders and light aeroplanes over the mountains, he designed a means of dropping supplies from a canvas container fitted below the machine, and perfected a technique of delivering everything from timber to crockery on the sites of mountain huts under construction in the remote fastnesses of the Alps. ( ... ) No one has ever come nearer to perfecting the age - long aspiration of man - to fly like a bird.