Salzburg-based railroad transport and logistics entrepreneur Gunther Pitterka (54) is on the verge of becoming a world champion at “collecting” airports. The owner of SETG, a company with around 200 employees, is part of an international collector community of flight enthusiasts whose goal is to fly to as many different airports around the world as possible and to document this in a competitive manner. The documentation and verification platform is the website www.flugstatistik.de.
According to the www.flugstatistik.de statistics page, the current top number of airports flown to by one participant around the world is 1581. Gunther Pitterka from Salzburg, currently number 2 in the collectors’ ranking for airport collecting, will make himself world number 1 by flying next Saturday and displacing the current number 1 from his top position. Pitterka will thus become the world record holder, having flown to 1582 different airfields.
The world champion flight will take place next Saturday, November 19, 2022. The flight with a 14-seater LET410 plane will go from Portoroz Airport in Istria (departure 12:15) to Aeroporto Giovanni Nicelli in Venice-Lido, the historic airport of Venice (Via R. Morandini, 9. 30126 Venezia VE), which still has a grass runway. And from where even scheduled flights to Austria took off in the 1930s. On board are numerous fans of the new world champion.
Pitterka has been involved in this curious but ambitious competition, which is associated with a passion for aviation and worldwide travel as a whole, since 1995. His original motive for taking part in it: overcoming a pronounced fear of flying.
In an attempt to fly to as many airports as possible, Pitterka has flown 2,928,010 kilometres in recent years. He has been in the air for 5,409.10 hours, has flown 73.06 times around the world and has flown to the moon 7.617 times. Pitterka has flown to Everest Base Camp, the Caribbean island of Saba (the shortest airport) and Bar Yehuda Airport (the lowest airport in the world/minus 386 metres).
Most of his flights to reach airports worldwide took off from Salzburg (1063), his home airport. In achieving his airport ranking, Pitterka has travelled on 566 different types of aircraft and flown on 743 different airlines. On his worldwide travels, Pitterka landed or took off in 189 countries.
There were also numerous curiosities on the many flights. For example, on an approach to Pyongyang, North Korea, the sun visors had to be lowered for reasons of secrecy, whereas they have to be raised for landings anywhere in the world. At Mount Kenya Airport, Pitterka experienced an aborted flight because a family of warthogs crossed the airfield shortly before landing. Pitterka’s attempt to reach Foula, the westernmost Shetland island, required 10 outbound attempts. Eight had to be aborted due to weather, one due to a seagull in the engine and only one outbound attempt was successful.
This post was published on 17 November 2022 16:16
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