hagopian wrote:Landing at the old HK Airport was one of the coolest, if not nerviest flying experience I ever had.
A few flights in Mexico, and landing at the old Molokai airport would be right up there, though.
Molokai, and other out islands used to be served by the very competent Royal Hawaiian Air Service - and Molokai's old strip, on the west side of the island, ended in a cliff.
Boy, those pilots were something else.
*sorry for straying there for a sec.
This could actually be a radio-related story as I got my first fear of scary runways while at CFPR Prince Rupert. I was there during the relatively short period during airline history when the routing to Prince Rupert include a stop at Sandspit on the (then known as) Queen Charlotte Islands. That was a positively wonderful experience, no matter what the weather. What was scary was the normal routing, which included a stop in Terrace.
Terrace, I was told at the time, has the runway from hell: three sides are mountain and the fourth is cliff. Never a wind inside that box canyon, so airplanes always landed from, and took off into, the cliff entrance/exit and hoped they could stop before they hit the mountain on landing, or fell off the cliff on takeoff.
Personally, the scariest landing I ever encountered was right here in Edmonton. Thankfully, I was already familiar with the fact that, when landing "downtown", one of the approaches required flying between skyscrapers low enough that the top floors were well above the top of the airplane. On this occasion, it was a scheduled Pacific Western Airlines flight from Calgary, in heavy fog, that was supposed to be diverted to the International Airport at Leduc. But the pilot insisted on landing downtown as there had been reports of the fog opening up around 50 feet off the ground. He told everyone that his plan was to pull up at the 50 foot level if he could not see the runway.
Even for the two amateur pilots seated around me, who had never been on the approach through the skyscrapers, the landing was not as scary as seeing the fog-shrouded skyscrapers appear and disappear ABOVE us as the plane, a Boeing 737, made the final approach to the airport amidst hard bumping turbulence.
Thankfully, the downtown airport was closed to all but the smallest planes running commercial flights 15 years ago, as the runways are just long enough to safely handle a 737. The airport will be closed for good in the next few years and converted into a state of the art housing development, complete with a canal and canal boats.
