“Kai Tak in Hong Kong was amazing - just as this guy describes. Another is Medellin, Colombia between the mountains”
“I think I have been through Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport a hundred or more times - I never will forget looking in people’s apartments and seeing a family watching television on the approach to the runway. A few of those little bottles of vodka always helped me get through the experience.”
I was 22 years old on my first trip to Hong Kong for work. Our flight was delayed ~6hrs so we hit the bar at Tom Bradley Terminal in LAX to wait. We were young and famously drunk when we boarded in LAX. We continued to drink the first 4-5 hrs on the flight. This was when you could still smoke in flight.
I passed out and slept the rest of the flight.
I DID however wake up in the middle of the 90 deg turn.
I VERY clearly remember waking up, face against the window, opening my eyes, and looking out and DOWN a little old lady hanging laundry on the rooftop. She was looking at me too. This being my first trip to HK I had no idea of the approach and how low it was. I assumed that since the plane was on its side and we were so close to the buildings that we were crashing. I screamed like a little girl.
I never lived that down.
Same here...except for the screaming.I was literally too scared (and too stunned) to scream out loud.But I *did* scream inside!
I flew from Lagos International in Nigeria to Warri Airport in Warri, Nigeria.
The law in Nigeria, after Babangida nationalized the oil rigs, was that 80 percent of all operations in Nigeria had to be STAFFED by Nigerians. That included aircraft. We were on final approach in a commuter turboprop into Warri. The pilot actually doing the flying was a Nigerian.
As we came in for a landing, you could clearly hear the British pilot screaming at the Nigerian pilot to pull up.
We hit the runway harder than I’ve ever experienced. My back and ass hurt for days after that.
We were going too fast and ran off the runway, but swerved in time to avoid crashing through the fence at the end (which was cinderblock). They let us out of the plane, and we all walked, with our luggage, back to the terminal as if that were a normal day at the airport.
Another place I hate flying into is Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. You fly this little CASA’s out of the air station in Miami, which is only 90 miles from Cuba. Nobody told us that to get to Gitmo, you couldn’t just fly over Cuba. It took nearly four hours to fly all the way around Cuba and into the naval base there.