Peoples' scheduled flight service between Vienna and Altenrhein is currently on hold. Therefore, the Bundesliga soccer players of SK Rapid Wien have to travel to their away match against SCR Altach by charter flight.

This will be carried out on Friday as OS 2651 with DHC Dash 8-400 from Austrian Airlines. The Viennese soccer team will meet Altach in Vorarlberg on Saturday. Since there is no commercial airport in the mentioned federal state, the Altenrhein airfield on Swiss territory has been used as the “Vorarlberg airport” for decades.

Rheintalflug built the “Ländle-Shuttle”

From this airport, Austrian Airlines served the connection to the capital Vienna, which is important for the local economy, for many years. However, they did not build this themselves, but the route was built by Rheintalflug Seewald Ges.mbH, which was bought in 2001. Rheintalflug was merged with the AUA subsidiary Tyrolean Airways in 2002. The Altenrhein crew base also came from this time and was only closed in 2019.

The Altenrhein-Vienna connection was discontinued by Austrian Airlines on March 31, 2013. Before that, there was tough competition with the then still young in-house airline of Altenrhein Airport, Peoples. The successor to the Rheintalflug, InterSky, also heated up competition on the Vienna route from Friedrichshafen. First, the Bregenz airline withdrew from this route, then Austrian Airlines from Altenrhein. The reason given at the time was that the route was no longer profitable enough. Since then, Peoples has been the sole supplier, however pauses the route until at least March 27, 2021so that the footballers have to resort to a chartered AUA dash.