Passengers arriving in Hong Kong before July 1998 tended to remember the last thirty seconds. The aircraft would descend not towards a runway but towards a hillside in Kowloon, on which was painted an enormous red-and-white checkerboard. About two nautical miles from touchdown, with the board filling the windscreen, the pilots would break off the instrument approach and hand-fly a 47-degree right turn — at low altitude, over one of the most densely packed urban areas on the planet — rolling the wings level only moments before the wheels met the tarmac. From the window seats, passengers swore they could see televisions flickering in living rooms and washing strung between the blocks. Pilots called the approach to runway 13 simply "the checkerboard"; travellers called it the Kai Tak heart attack.
Nothing about the airport was planned to end up that way. The name commemorates two businessmen, Ho Kai and Au Tak, whose 1920s scheme to reclaim land in Kowloon Bay for housing failed; the vacant ground found use as an airfield from 1925. The occupying Japanese expanded it during the Second World War using prisoner-of-war labour, and after the war it simply grew where it stood, because Hong Kong had almost nowhere else flat to put it. The defining piece of engineering came in 1958: a single runway built on a promontory reclaimed from Victoria Harbour, later extended to about 3.4 kilometres, jutting into the water like a diving board. Mountains rose to the north, the harbour lay on three sides, and the city crowded against the fence — buildings beneath the flight path were height-capped for decades.
Flying the checkerboard
The geography dictated the infamous approach. Aircraft could not come straight in without flying into hills, so the Instrument Guidance System — a beam much like a normal instrument landing system, but deliberately aimed at the checkerboard hill rather than at the runway — brought crews over the harbour and into Kowloon on instruments, whereupon they finished the final right-hand dogleg by eye. In a crosswind, and Hong Kong's typhoon seasons guaranteed brutal ones, crews crabbed sideways through the turn and kicked the aircraft straight in the last seconds. Airlines required special training and qualification before pilots could fly it, and at many carriers the landing was reserved for captains. Professionals insisted it was perfectly safe when flown correctly — and unforgiving when it was not. The most spectacular reminder came on 4 November 1993, when a China Airlines Boeing 747 landing in a typhoon slid off the soaked runway into the harbour; all 296 people aboard survived, and for days the jet sat in the water with its tail fin protruding, until the fin was cut away because it interfered with the airport's navigation signals.
By the 1990s the anachronism had become absurd. An airfield laid out in the propeller age was handling wide-body jets in such numbers that it ranked among the busiest airports in the world — first for international air cargo, and near the top for international passengers — on one runway, with no room to grow and a night curfew for the sake of the tens of thousands of people living under the turn. The answer was one of the great civil engineering programmes of the century: a replacement at Chek Lap Kok, built on a largely artificial island of flattened granite off Lantau, linked to the city by new bridges, tunnels, motorways and a dedicated airport railway.
One night in July
The end came with theatrical precision. On the night of 6 July 1998, the final scheduled departure — a Cathay Pacific flight bound for London — climbed away over the harbour, and shortly afterwards the territory's director of civil aviation, Richard Siegel, closed seventy-three years of flying with a brief valediction from the control tower: "Goodbye Kai Tak, and thank you." Then he dimmed the lights. Through the small hours a convoy of barges and lorries carried everything a working airport needs across the water, and Chek Lap Kok opened for business the same morning — one of the largest overnight logistical operations in aviation history. The old runway lay quiet for years, hosting go-kart races and car parks before a cruise terminal rose on its seaward end; the checkerboard itself still stands on the hillside above Kowloon Tsai, a navigation aid with nothing left to navigate. Pilots, who are trained to prize uneventfulness, remember the place with unprofessional affection. Kai Tak was the last great airport where an airline captain, hand on the yoke between the tower blocks, visibly earned the landing.
Quiz nuggets
- Kai Tak is named after businessmen Ho Kai and Au Tak, whose failed 1920s land reclamation became an airfield in 1925.
- The runway 13 approach used an Instrument Guidance System aimed at a hillside checkerboard, followed by a hand-flown 47-degree right turn.
- The single runway, built into Victoria Harbour in 1958, was later extended to about 3.4 kilometres.
- On 4 November 1993 a China Airlines 747 slid into the harbour in a typhoon; all 296 aboard survived.
- Operations ended on 6 July 1998 with the words "Goodbye Kai Tak, and thank you", and Chek Lap Kok opened the next morning.