Geneva
Airport

Yes, and a great many do. Geneva is the principal gateway to the Alps and one of the busiest business aviation airports in Europe. The runway is 12,795 feet, fire cover is ICAO Category 9, and the airport is four kilometres from the city centre with rail into the Swiss network from the terminal. The difficulty is not capability, it is capacity at the times everyone wants.

Yes. Movements are coordinated and prior permission also applies. Outside the winter peak this is administrative rather than difficult. On a peak ski weekend it becomes the entire planning problem, and slots need requesting far earlier than the trip would otherwise demand.

For a few weeks each winter Geneva absorbs the private traffic of an entire ski season, and constraints that are routine in June become decisive in February. Slots and parking are both scarce. Aircraft are frequently asked to drop and go rather than remain on the ground, which means a positioning leg to another field and a return for the pickup, and that has to be built into the crew duty and the cost from the outset rather than discovered on the day.

The aircraft lands, disembarks its passengers and departs immediately to park elsewhere, coming back for the pickup. It is not just a matter of pressure on the ramp, it is a published rule: a layover of more than three hours, and any upgrade to a widebody, requires prior approval from the airport authority. Planning the positioning legs in advance is the difference between a smooth trip and a very expensive improvisation.

More than three hours requires prior approval from the airport authority. During the Geneva Motor Show in March and EBACE in May, parking is capped at a maximum of two hours. Those two events are the tightest weeks of the year for ground space, and EBACE in particular fills the field with exactly the aircraft that would otherwise be parking there.

Yes, and departures close well before arrivals. The curfew for slot allocation runs 2400 to 0604 CET for arrivals and 2126 to 0559 CET for departures. A full ban applies to departures from 2400 to 0600 and to arrivals from 2400 to 0500, with movements between 2200 and 2400 and between 0500 and 0600 permitted only under specific conditions. In practice an evening departure has to be committed to a good deal earlier than an evening arrival.

Yes, handling goes through an approved agent. As at Zurich this is standard rather than onerous, but it makes the handling arrangement part of the booking.

12,795 feet by 164 feet, in concrete, on a single runway designated 04/22. Length is never the constraint at Geneva. Field elevation is 1,411 feet.

It lies entirely within Swiss territory, but its northern limit runs along the Swiss-French border and the airport can be accessed from both countries. The freight operations are reachable from either side, which makes Geneva a European Union freight hub even though Switzerland is not an EU member. For passengers the practical point is that a French-side arrival for onward travel into Haute-Savoie is possible without crossing the border on the ground.

Geneva is the closest major airport to a large part of the French and Swiss Alps, which is exactly why it is under the pressure it is. Chamonix, Verbier, Megeve and the Portes du Soleil are all within a reasonable transfer, and for most of them Geneva beats any alternative on total door to door time even allowing for the airport being busy.

It depends which side of the Alps you are going to. For the Engadin and St Moritz, Samedan is the field, subject to aircraft performance and crew qualification. For Ticino and the Italian lakes, Lugano. For central Switzerland, Buochs. Where none of those work the honest answer is often to accept Geneva and plan the drop and go properly rather than chase a clever alternative that adds two hours of driving.

Four kilometres northwest of the city centre, partly in the municipality of Meyrin and partly in Le Grand-Saconnex. It is owned by the Canton of Geneva and operated by Geneve Aeroport. It was formerly, and is still unofficially, known as Cointrin.

The Grand Council of Geneva approved an airfield at Meyrin on 11 October 1919, and a simple field was established at Cointrin covering 54 hectares. The wooden sheds were replaced by three concrete hangars between 1926 and 1931, and the first concrete runway followed in 1937, measuring just 405 metres by 21. During the Second World War the site grew to 95 hectares and the main runway was extended to 1,000 metres and then by a further 200. After the war Geneva was identified as one of Switzerland's four main urban airports, and the first terminal opened in 1946. That building is today Terminal 2.

It passed 15 million passengers a year for the first time in December 2014 and serves as a hub for Swiss International Air Lines and easyJet Switzerland. Swiss operates its only long-haul service outside Zurich from Geneva, to New York JFK. All of that scheduled traffic sits on one runway, which is the underlying reason private movements have to fit around it.

Central European Time, CET in winter and CEST in summer, which is UTC+1 and UTC+2 respectively.