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An altiport is an
aerodrome An aerodrome (Commonwealth English) or airdrome (American English) is a location from which aircraft flight operations take place, regardless of whether they involve air cargo, passengers, or neither, and regardless of whether it is for publi ...
for small
airplane An airplane or aeroplane (informally plane) is a fixed-wing aircraft that is propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine, propeller, or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and wing configurations. The broad ...
s and
helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attribu ...
s, situated on or within mountainous terrain. The term is generally confined to describing small mountainous aerodromes in the
French Alps The French Alps are the portions of the Alps mountain range that stand within France, located in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur regions. While some of the ranges of the French Alps are entirely in France, others, such as ...
.''Flying Magazine'', November 1975, page 5 Altiports are generally characterised by having a runway with a pronounced slope, which aids aircraft deceleration when landing and assists
acceleration In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time. Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnitude and direction). The orientation of an object's acceleration is given by ...
during takeoff. High altitude means less lift so that aircraft need higher speed at takeoff and landing.


List of altiports

upright=1.3, Courchevel Altiport, showing the sloped runway


References

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