This July he turned seventy. «Well, now you’re old», he thought – for the first time it dawned on him that things won’t go on forever. «You lose people close to you, sometimes even younger than yourself.» But the worries soon passed. «You’re better off enjoying every day for as long as you can», says Kistler, «you don’t really have a choice anyway.»
Flying was always his passion: as a child he folded paper planes, as a teenager he built model aircraft. His professional take-off came in 1978 as a flight instructor in Basel. Two years later he was a co-pilot, soon a captain at Crossair. In 1987 he was appointed head of flight operations for a UN mission in the Middle East; in 1991 he joined Edelweiss Air as chief pilot, and from 2002 to 2014 he was also the airline’s CEO. His last flight, in April 2017, was the return from the Maldives at the controls of an Airbus A330 – the gentle but final landing on a flying career of nearly 40 years.
«Looking back, I wonder how I ever fitted it all in – there were phases of 220 flight hours a month», Kistler says. That his back still nags him comes as no surprise. When you sleep so little because your head is too full, you need an outlet. In his younger years it was endurance running: «I set myself one race a month; twice I ran the Zurich Marathon.» When he once came back dehydrated from a flight from Morocco and had to make an emergency landing because of a kidney-stone attack, he realised he had to take better care of his body.
That was when he remembered his model kits of old. The saving idea: in retirement, build an aircraft again – this time at a 1:1 scale. It became a Van’s RV-10, home-built. On 1 July 2020, at eight o’clock sharp, the moment came: the maiden flight. «What a fantastic experience, to have created with your own hands a flying machine you can climb into and fly away in!» And there is more: he regularly takes off in the simulator too – together with the Edelweiss crew, with whom he is still in touch today.
«That a hobby too?» – it’s the question Charly now puts to anyone who marvels that he doesn’t simply «retire». «Putting my feet up is out of the question for me.» His motto, in closing, sounds almost offhand: «Once you’ve understood that in life you’re your own boss, the joy of living comes all by itself.»
This article appeared in MEN issue 2/22 (November 2022).
