A factory under the mountain

In December 1939, with Europe already at war, a company was registered in the small Swiss town of Stans with one purpose: to build aeroplanes. Its backer was Emil Bührle, the industrialist whose Oerlikon works sold cannon to anyone who could pay, and its fixer was Antoine Gazda, who had been negotiating to build Spitfires under licence. The site was chosen for a reason that now sounds like a spy novel. It sat in the lee of Mount Pilatus, the craggy ridge above Lucerne, where a factory would be hard to see and harder to bomb. The mountain gave the company its name, and the company kept it.

Trainers built from fighter parts

The Spitfires never came. Instead Pilatus spent the war doing what a young firm in a neutral country could get: modifying 33 EKW C-36 aircraft for the Swiss Air Force and building a five-seat experimental machine, the SB-2 Pelican, which flew in May 1944. Its first real product was the P-2 trainer of 1945, a tough little piston aircraft that, to keep costs down, rolled on landing-gear parts taken from Swiss Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. The air force flew the P-2 for 35 years. The P-3 followed in 1953, and in the lean post-war years Pilatus also built wooden gliders and fuselages for de Havilland Vampires and Venoms.

The Porter that landed on Dhaulagiri

Then came the aircraft that made the name. The PC-6 Porter first flew on 4 May 1959, a gawky, slab-sided utility plane that could haul a load into and out of a field barely longer than a tennis court. It was built for the Alps and the jungle, and it went everywhere: Austrian and Swiss soldiers flew it, so did the CIA’s airline Air America, and by the early 1990s around 40 per cent of the Porters in Europe were carrying skydivers. A Porter still holds the record for the highest landing by a fixed-wing aircraft, 5,750 metres on the Dhaulagiri glacier in Nepal. Production ran for 63 years and ended in 2022 with 604 delivered.

The trainer that conquered the world

The PC-7 began life slowly. A prototype flew in April 1966, but the project only got serious after the 1973 oil crisis made fuel-hungry jet trainers look extravagant. The production PC-7 flew in August 1978, and more than 618 have been built for over twenty air forces. Its successor, the PC-9 of 1984, did something even more remarkable: rebuilt in partnership with Beechcraft, it won the American JPATS competition in 1995 and became the T-6 Texan II, ordered by the hundred for the US Air Force and Navy. Then the PC-21 of 2002 set out to take students almost all the way to the fighter cockpit on a turboprop. Air forces from Singapore to Spain signed up.

The PC-12 changes everything

In 1987 Pilatus began work on something completely different: a single-engine turboprop big enough to carry nine passengers or a stretcher, cheap enough to run like a car. The PC-12 first flew on 31 May 1991 and was certified in 1994. Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service was the launch customer. The US Air Force bought it for special operations as the U-28A Draco. By May 2023, 2,000 had been delivered and the fleet had passed ten million flight hours. The PC-24 jet, first flown in 2015, followed the same formula: a business jet with a cargo door the size of a pallet and permission to land on gravel and grass.

Weapons, scandals and tariffs

The Swiss company has never escaped the question of what its trainers are used for. Burma and Guatemala, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Mexico in Chiapas in 1994 and Chad in 2008 all bolted weapons onto Pilatus aircraft sold as trainers, and Bern repeatedly had to respond. In 2019 the Swiss foreign ministry tried to stop Pilatus supporting PC-21s in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, a ban a court annulled in 2021; the same year Indian investigators looked into bribery claims around a PC-7 deal. In August 2025 a 39 per cent US tariff made Pilatus halt deliveries to its biggest market, until they resumed that November. Through it all, the factory under the mountain kept building.

Factories

• Stans headquarters and works · Stans, Nidwalden, at Buochs airfield — Main plant since 1940; site chosen near Mount Pilatus for wartime security
• Pilatus Business Aircraft / Pilatus Aircraft USA · Broomfield, Colorado — Completion and sales centre for the North American market
• Pilatus Aircraft Australia · Adelaide, South Australia — Established 1998
• Pilatus Aircraft Ibérica · Seville, Spain — Founded 2024
• Pilatus Aircraft Industry (Chongqing) · Chongqing, China — Joint venture established 2013

People

• Emil Georg Bührle · industrialist, co-founder — Owner of the Oerlikon arms works that backed Pilatus
• Antoine Gazda · engineer and arms dealer, co-founder — Negotiated a Spitfire licence before the company was formed
• Oscar J. Schwenk · CEO from 1993, chairman until 2020 — Joined as an engineer in 1979; led the 2000 break from Unaxis and the PC-12, PC-21 and PC-24 programmes
• Markus Bucher · CEO — Chief executive in the PC-24 era
• Hansueli Loosli · chairman from 2020 — Former chairman of Swisscom

Records and firsts

• PC-6 Porter: highest landing by a fixed-wing aircraft, 5,750 m (18,865 ft) on the Dhaulagiri glacier, Nepal
• PC-24: first business jet with a standard pallet-size cargo door
• PC-12 fleet passed 10 million flight hours by May 2023