Four F/A-18 combat planes landed on Wednesday morning on the A1 motorway between Payerne and Avenches (VD). This Swiss Air Force exercise, called ‘Alpha Uno’ and unpublished since 1991, takes place all day.
Departing from the Payerne military airfield, the first F/A-18 landed at 9:58 a.m. Around 20 minutes later, after the runway had been checked, the other three landed successively on the asphalt of the A1. They will take off again later in the morning and the exercise will be repeated in the afternoon.
The event is not public. But some 300 guests were invited (150 in the morning, 150 in the afternoon) to follow him from a stand set up for the occasion, at the edge of a beet field and, for security reasons, 300 m away. from the landing site, which was done from the east (Avenches side).
With ‘Alpha Uno’, the army is training to ‘decentralize’ its activities. Because with a concentration on three air bases – Payerne, Emmen (LU) and Meiringen (BE) – it could be vulnerable in the event of an attack. An exercise of this scale had not been carried out since 1991 in Ticino.
Highway prepared
To carry out this test, the highway between Payerne and Avenches was closed on Tuesday evening and will remain closed until Thursday morning. The central guardrail was removed and special markings were made on the roadway.
A double forced exit was installed at the junctions of Payerne and Avenches. A diversion route has been put in place for the approximately 25,000 vehicles which travel on this section every day. It passes on the cantonal road through Domdidier, Dompierre and Corcelles-près-Payerne.
This section of the A1 was selected for its direct connection to the Payerne military airfield, but also because it had been prepared to accommodate combat aircraft during its construction in 1995. The volume of traffic, lower than on other Other motorway sections, and the possibility of creating bypasses also explain why it was chosen for this exercise.
Reviews
Just after the first landings, the Group for a Switzerland without an Army (GSsA) issued a press release criticizing the exercise. He denounces ‘a symbolic action aimed at promoting military force.’
According to him, the army ‘gives the illusion of artificial security instead of working on concrete solutions’. Before adding that the political world should ‘finally move towards a lucid analysis of threats instead of spending billions on unrealistic threat scenarios’, writes the GSsA.
/ATS
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