In the video above, the Tauern Wind Park in Oberzeiring, Austria, gets an adrenaline-seeking visitor—an airplane weaving through its 11 wind turbines.
The wind farm’s elevation is the highest in Europe, situated 1,900 meters above sea level. It can only be reached by car between April and October, and in the other months, only by ski. It can be reached by stunt plane whenever the stunt pilot chooses, presumably.
Where most of us see the wind farm as a power source, champion pilot Hannes Arch saw its 60-meter-high turbines as an 11-stage aerial slalom. He’s local to the area, and he’d been thinking about it a while: “When you have a such a wind farm at your front door and fly past it often, it’s no wonder you want to fly through it at some point.”
And fly through it he did, at 300 kilometers per hour, and it was even more challenging than it looks. The mountaintop turbines aren’t on a flat surface, so, Arch says, “The challenge of this wind park, compared to air races, is it’s in nature. It’s not flat, so you’re going up and down—it’s in the middle of the mountains.”
Careening through the turbines required an incredible amount of care and skill. As Arch put it, “Every second, you have to be perfectly clear in your mind that you have wind turbines in front of you and need to know precisely what you’re going to do next.”
