Switzerland Today

Greetings from Zurich!

Switzerland is taking to the skies – but in unusual ways. Read on to find out why air force fighter jets are using motorways to take-off and land and how Swiss scientists are searching for alien life in outer space.

But first, we bring you the biggest news stories of the day.

Nemo wins the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland Keystone

In the news: Eurovision 2025 plans progressing, F1’s Sauber cleared of advertising misdemeanor and Swiss universities slip in international ranking.

• The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation has appointed Reto Peritz from Swiss radio and television, SRF and Moritz Stadler from the French-speaking Swiss television, RTS to manage Switzerland’s Eurovision Song Contest 2025 task force. 
• The Sauber Formula 1 motor racing team has been cleared by the Swiss Federal Gaming Board of promoting an unlicensed online gambling operation.
• ETH Zurich has again been crowned as the best university in continental Europe, but most other Swiss universities have fallen in the QS ranking.
• The UN refugee agency UNHCR has called for the rescue of people on dangerous migration routes to be expanded.
• Switzerland’s parliament has called on the government to exercise better control over aid funds to Palestine.

Fighter jets on a Swiss motorway Keystone / Peter Schneider

Swiss air force takes to the roads

Motorists were diverted from a major Swiss highway today to make room for an air force experiment that used the A1 between Avenches and Payerne as a runway.

Four F/A-18 fighter jets used the stretch of the motorway in a test military exercise known as “Alpha Uno”.

The idea behind the operation was to test alternative venues from which to mount military air operations in the event of hostilities.

Switzerland’s three military airfields are concentrated around Lucerne and Bern, making them an easy target for enemy attack.

It’s the latest way that Switzerland has chosen to prepare its armed forces with war raging in Europe for over two years.

“I am very satisfied and proud of my people who accomplished it,” air force commander Peter Merz told Swiss public television SRF.

Motorists might be hoping the air force does not make this a habit. The air force did at least return the road to its original condition before leaving.

Night skies in the Atacama Keystone

Is there anybody out there?

Swiss scientists are part of an international project to build a new space telescope that will hunt for signs of life on distant exoplanets.

The universities of Bern and Geneva are part of a team putting together the ANDES high-performance spectrograph, which will be a vital component in the European Southern Observatory’s ‘Extremely Large Telescope’ (ELT).

The ANDES project also has a very large budget of €120 million (CHF116.6 million) and will fit into a telescope that measures 39 metres in diameter.

The ELT is being assembled in the Atacama Desert in Chile and is expected to be up and running in 2028.

It will be used to determine the properties of distant astronomical objects, such as their chemical composition, to discover whether there is life in the universe.

And in case anyone is wondering, ANDES stands for “ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph”, which is very good at splitting light into its different colours.