Remembering the world's most terrifying airport

Hong Kong, you will surely be aware, is at the top of the news agenda in these bright days of mid-summer. The ongoing demonstrations against attempts by Beijing to impose a new law permitting the extradition of citizens for trial in mainland China has seen the former British colony make regular appearances in the headlines.

Only yesterday, a war of words erupted between Britain and the Far East's superpower over whether these machinations are in contravention of the handover agreement between the two nations – whose 22nd anniversary passed earlier this week.

But while the increasingly bitter struggle over the relationship of this "Special Administrative Region" with China plays out on the front pages, a huge piece of its past is quietly fading from view, amid a blur of scaffolding and high-rise construction cranes. 

In many ways, Kai Tak was intrinsic to the image of the old Hong Kong. An airport notorious for the pulse-quickening nature of its landings – and the skill it demanded of pilots who had to drop an aircraft onto its infamous Runway 13 –it fitted neatly with the seat-of-the-pants identity of a British-run harbour-metropolis marooned on the edge of an unsmiling giant of a country.

The aerial gymnastics required to bring a 747 into land over an urban labyrinth – that is not only home to seven million people but framed by soaring peaks – led to the coining of a pithy term to describe the attack of nerves often endured by even the most experienced of passengers: "The Kai Tak Heart Attack".

Now, though, what was once a busy hub of arrivals and departures is being slowly erased from the map.

Tucked away on the north-east side of Kowloon Bay, across the water from the main Hong Kong Island, the remains of the airport are effectively squatting on some of the most desirable unused land anywhere on the planet.

As the city continues to grow – yet remains hemmed in by its own geography – the value of what is prime waterfront real estate has sky-rocketed.

This week, Bloomberg reported that a single plot had been sold for an unprecedented HK$12.9 billion (£1.32billion) – just the latest mouthful of ground, earmarked for a luxury apartment complex, to have been bitten out of the bigger pie since the Hong Kong authorities began selling off the derelict space in 2011.

There will be hotels too, as well as new port infrastructure. The Kai Tak Cruise Terminal, built at the tip of the old runway, and able to welcome ships 1,180ft (360m) in length, has been operational since June 2013.

It was inevitable that Kai Tak would "vanish" in this way. Just as it chimed with the free-wheeling aesthetic of the colonial Hong Kong, so it was swept away by the dawn of the city's new "alliance" with China.

Indeed, by the moment sovereignty was formally transferred amid the pomp and pageantry of July 1 1997, it was all but out of time.

It was no longer really fit for purpose as the 21st century approached; nor was it needed by the new millennium, with the finishing touches being put to Chek Lap Kok International Airport, on its enormous parcel of reclaimed land, 24 miles to the south-west.

Kai Tak's last flight – the ceremonial and symbolic departure of a Cathay Pacific CX3340, making the short leap to Chek Lap Kok's newborn gleam in the near-distance – took off at 1.05am on July 6 1998.

The lights had officially gone on at this £16billion replacement less than four days earlier – at noon on July 2. Hours later, Air Force One, carrying then-US President Bill Clinton, had touched down on the fresh tarmac –and Kai Tak had tumbled into the twilight zone.

Many were relieved that it had gone there. The rapid growth of Hong Kong below its flightpath had made unviable what had been founded as a grass airstrip and an aviation school in 1924 – but had never been envisaged as a welcome mat for the large-scale aircraft of the later 20th century.

Indeed, no modern airport designer would have even considered a site that is fenced in by Kowloon Bay on one side and a ridgeline – including the 1,913ft (983m) Tate's Cairn and the 1,624ft (495m) Lion Rock – on the other.

But once the RAF had taken up residency in the late 1920s – and once a control tower had been added in 1935, supplementing the concrete slipway for seaplane arrivals that had been laid down in 1928 – Kai Tak's awkward future was assured.

By 1996, it was the third busiest airport in the world, handling 30 million passengers every year – but its limitations had long been exposed.

The need for aircraft to approach at a low level over both Hong Kong Island and Kowloon had long meant a nighttime flight curfew of 11.30pm to 6.30am, and a restriction on the legal building height in the latter district.

But even though the landing strip was extended over and over into Kowloon Bay – reclamation projects having stretched Runway 13 to over two miles (11,120ft/3,390m) by the moment the full-time whistle blew in 1998 – it was increasingly obvious that the city had outgrown the airport.

Legend has it that passengers could see through the windows of nearby apartments as their planes descended. Less romantic was the reality that, as aircraft became bigger, so the struggle to land them safely mushroomed in complexity.

The final major incident at Kai Tak, on November 4 1993, saw a China Airlines Boeing 747-400 crash into the bay after touching down two thirds of the way down the runway during a typhoon.

It was unable to stop before it reached the water. Remarkably, there were no fatalities – but accidents where planes had either flown into hillsides (Mounts Butler and Parker on Hong Kong Island had both claimed victims) or into the sea – had been a relatively regular occurrence in the previous half-century. The Hong Kong government had been searching for alternative sites since the mid-Eighties.

Part of the problem with Kai Tak was what pilots came to refer to as the "Hong Kong Turn" – the landing manoeuvre that would require them to fly north-east over Victoria Harbour and western Kowloon, then make a sharp 47° swerve to the east to line up with the runway.

The plane would also have to plunge some 400ft (121m) during the turn – a challenge for any pilot that was only ever exacerbated by the need to use visual markers to maintain position.

One of these was an orange aviation marker on a hill above Kowloon Tsai Park – the cue for the swerve. Throw in regular crosswinds and the threat of typhoon conditions (which can afflict the city between May and early November), and it is easy to understand why pilots considered Kai Tak one of the true trials of technique.

It was still imprinted in the mind of Russell Davie, who flew for Cathay Pacific during a 30-year career, when interviewed by CNN on the 20th anniversary of the airport's closure.

"As a pilot, it was unique," he recalled. "It was the only major airport in the world that required a 45-degree turn below 500 feet to line up with the runway, literally flying between the high-rise buildings, passing close to the famous orange and white checkerboard as you made that final turn toward the runway."

Of course, Kai Tak will never entirely disappear from the Hong Kong landscape. Its shape is too obvious, even if a thousand hotels swarm across its lost torso.

Runway 13 – which had its origins in the blood and sweat of the prisoners of war who, during Japan's control of Hong Kong during the Second World War, put down the first concrete landing strips – remains obvious to the naked eye, thrusting directly out into Kowloon Bay, its hard right-angles unmistakeable as the work of human hands.

Peer at it from Hoi Sham Park on the Kowloon waterfront, and you can still imagine those jets scudding in low – the roar of the engines drowning out the televisions in the flats on either side, the nervous tension of machinery passing so very close to masonry, and the dying embers of both the 20th century and the British Empire, cooling to ashen obscurity.