Posted on 07/07/2013 8:45:19 PM PDT by TexGrill
Most dangerous airport Top 16
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Kai Tak.
Where your HK office knew you were in town by your passage by their window
I miss those days.
leui two are in the Carib, and were built as fighter airfields during ww2. The one on tiny Saba is the ONLY flat piece of land on the entire island.
The road across the runway is Gibraltar. Again, no where else to extend the runway to when the jet-age came.
Funchal is on Madeira, and was carved out of the mountain. 131 died there on a TAP Air 727 that plunged 200 feet off the end of the then 5250Ft runway in 1977. The runway extension (the pillared section) is considered one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th century.
I love princess juliana airport. mostly for what surrounds it you land on the water #15. later you can sit at the bar where the picture was taken and watch flights come in. stay on the dutch side. Or rent a boat and sail to Barts and have a beer at “cheeseburger in paradise” at 10:00 a.m. it’s a short sail. Check your anchor at 40 ft down visually from your boat. snooze, then set sail to Sint Eustatius, The first country to recognize the US via a cannon salute to our visiting naval vessel (buying gunpowder 177n?. (beautiful island, beautiful people) then to Nevis spend a few days. open a bank account. or go to Anguilla and ask for the Cab owner Mussington. Open a bank account there. Move your money.
Milford sound NZ was a rather fun plane ride as well. You fly in thru the fyords from the ocean side. i think the pilot put an anchore out to stop the plane. but when you get off the plane you realize the bugs stop the plane because when you get off the plane the begin to eat you alive.
I agree about Kai Tak, and yes, it was considered very dangerous. OTOH, it was a very effective way to wake up pax after a long flight from the U.S.
I recently flew into Belize City - our plane sat down, threw on reverse thrusters and the pilot stood on the brakes, then turned around and taxied back to let us off at the terminal.
BZE has no taxiway just one short runway strip.
I cant remember the island, but one of those islands had a ramp at the end of it to loft you up
Now THAT’S flyin’ !!!!!
A couple of my buds landed at McMurdo Station on a C130 in dead of winter to rescue their sister.
That was a pisser landing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerri_Nielsen
I have had many float plane trips in Canada and Alaska dodging rocks in rivers, trees at the edge of lakes, and mountain top rocks that the pilot thought several feet of clearance was plenty.
Had two other landings that were scarier than any of the pictured airports could deliver.
#1. Plummer’s Lodge landing strip, Great Bear Lake, Canada NWT. Boeing 737 flight from Winnipeg, landed on a rock and gravel runway.
Rocks bouncing off the bottom of the wings and fuselage sounded like a hail storm on a metal roof. Just got stopped short of water at end of runway.
#2. Unknown/unremembered make twin engined plane flight carrying 6 fishermen, three guides, and a pilot and another crewman from Quinhagak on the western coast of Alaska to Dillingham.
When we reached our destination, the wind was blowing 60+mph from the west. The tips of the trees were almost touching the ground. The Airport had only a N-S runway.
The plane could not land with a side-wind of ~40mph or more. So, the pilot landed on a short taxi-way and the width of the runway. He made a steep descent over a building, slammed the plane into the ground, locked the brakes, and reversed the props. I think we only went a few feet beyond the runway width.
Well there was a dehaviland twin otter in one of those pics.
Great Beasty
Grumman Goose. Cool airplane.
Many in our family worked for Grumman on Long Island - Bethpage. Starting in the late ‘40’s.
We’re now in CA since 1969, where the Grumman
F-14 Tom Cat was brought to test it’s missiles out over the Pacific from a Navy Base.
We were transferred here for the project, and retired here.
I visited Saba twice. The original 20 Dutch families that settled this ex-volcano, sailed around the island for three days before they found a place to land a boat. The families used a correspondence course on road building, because Dutch civil engineers said building a road to connect the four settlements on the island was impossible. It took the 20 families 20 years to build the road. Everything on the bloody island is always up hill from where you are! The runway length at Saba is 400 meters [1,312 feet].
Princess Juliana Airport on St. Maarten/St. Martin is a hoot; your jumbo jet comes in right over the beach and perimeter road. Tourists come down to the airport fence to see if they can hold on against the trust of the jets as they takeoff. [They can't and get blown end over end. Amazing how that works!] Runway is 2,180 meters [7,152 feet].
Ah, the best airport of all is St. Bart's. Your approach is made over the saddle of two ridges that separate the town of Gustavia from the airport. A road runs either way on top of the ridges and from the town to the airport over the saddle. On approach, the pilot has to make a carrier-type dive to nail the end of the runway. This is imperative, otherwise you can't stop to avoid going into the bay at the end of the airstrip. Pilots who land long, will hit the sandy beach and, if they've enough speed, will be in the water. Runway is 650 meters [2,133 feet]. This is one of the worst airports I've seen. Saba's is just as bad.
I remember landing in Caracas way back in the late 50s.
The end of the runway looked like a boat ramp right down into the water.
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