Today you will visit Kai Tak, or what remains of Kai Tak. Technically it was Hong Kong International Airport, even more technically HKG, but everybody called it Kai Tak. Now there is another HKG, several miles to the west, but the little strip of land on which Kai Tak sat still exists.
Where did the name come from? Back in the 1910s two local businessmen bought a patch of land in Kowloon in the hope of turning it into prime real estate. Their names were Ho Kai and Au Tak. They died long before the land became an airport but their names lived on.
But why did you go to Kai Tak? You've read about it. With the turny planes coming down through the skyscrapers. The airport closed in 1998 and now it is mostly a building site, but traces of its past life remain.
The memory of Kai Tak will fade and be replaced by a cartoon, but the same thing happened to Venice and Rome and will happen to the megacities of tomorrow. It will happen to Hong Kong. Humanity's past is a collective set of fantasy visions. You witnessed some of them during your lifetime. You walked past others without seeing them because they were not yet legends.
Runway terminology is confusing. Kai Tak had one runway, but it had two numbers - runway 13 ran from north-to-south, runway 31 ran from south-to-north, although it was the same patch of tarmac. Most aircraft landed and took off from runway 13, north-to-south.
I decided to write this article in the style of 1980s postmodern literature, partially because I was in a nostalgic mood, and also because it allows me to relax and let the subject generate most of the text.
That's Kai Tak in the photo above, in between the big ship and the skyscrapers. From a distance it almost looks as though airliners are parked on it, but in reality the airliners are little boats in a harbour between the former runway and the new waterfront.
The right part, the reflective part, you can see it, the metallic part, that's the cruise liner terminal. The cruise liner terminal, right there. It was deserted when you went there. Cruise liners visit Hong Kong from December to April, when the weather is cooler and less humid.
The buildings in the background were mostly built post-Kai Tak, particularly the mirrored buildings closer to the waterfront, but people who lived in the apartment blocks in the far distance had a grandstand view of aircraft landing at Kai Tak. During the final approach people on the top floors could look down on the aircraft. "That's awesome", he said.
The big ship in the middle distance looks like a cruise liner, but it's not. It's a casino ship. The Starry Metropolis. The only gambling allowed in Hong Kong is horse racing, so each night the Starry Metropolis sails a few miles out of Hong Kong bay into international waters, where there is no law. The guests dance and gamble and have fun, and perhaps you will join them one day.
Now the strings begin to swell. Ken Morse's rostrum camera pans over vintage photographs while Bob Peck narrates. Kai Tak is as old as airports. In the 1920s it was a grassy field on the mainland operated by Britain's Royal Air Force, but in 1941 the Japanese invaded and took over. During the rest of the war they upgraded the facility with concrete runways. This did nothing to stop the Allies from obliterating Japan's navy and levelling Tokyo with firebombs and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so in 1945 they handed it all back.
The cruise terminal has a mixture of nautical and aviation iconography. Even though it has been defunct for over twenty years the airport has far more cachet than the cruise line terminal, so most of the design details make reference to the airport rather than ships and anchors etc. Little flutes chase each other.
I wasn't sure if the lifebelts were actual functioning lifebelts or a design detail. They seem too elaborate to be set-dressing. Sadly you can't sprint off the end of the runway into the water; there are fences, a steep drop, and some rocks in the way.
In 1946 a group of businessmen who owned a war surplus DC-3 tried to set up an airline in mainland China, but after harassment from the Chinese authorities they decamped to Hong Kong and parked their DC-3 at Kai Tak. The airline was renamed Cathay Pacific, because the founders dreamed that one day they might fly planes across the Pacific to the United States. And they did! They did, and Cathay Pacific still exists.
Apropos of nothing, Hong Kong's pre-1997 coins are still legal tender today. Coins minted before 1992 have Queen Elizabeth II on them, but after that date the handover was inevitable so 1992-1997 coins had a flower on the other side. The contactless Octopus card was very successful and so from 1998 until 2011 the Hong Kong government stopped minting coins altogether.
Do you remember the advertising slogan? "Singapore Girl, you're a great way to fly"? That was the advertising slogan for Singapore Airlines. I can't remember Cathay Pacific's advertising slogan.
Look at the people having a picnic in the plane's shadow. Aren't they cute? This is essentially one-quarter of Kai Tak Runway Park, at least in 2019, and they're sheltering under the aeroplane because the only other sources of shade are enclosed benches.
I was too small for the coming wave of turboprop and jet airliners, so in 1958 I was given a whole new runway built on a reclaimed strip of land sticking out into the harbour. Suddenly I was mighty! In 1975 I was extended once more, to cope with jumbo jets and Concorde, although in practice Concorde rarely visited me. It didn't have the range to fly non-stop from Europe, and it was forbidden from reaching supersonic speeds over land, so I was an awkward destination.
Singapore Airlines flew a leased Concorde to Hong Kong briefly but only for a year. Charter flights visited me every so often, but even so Concorde rarely appeared on my radar screens. I had mixed feelings about Concorde. It was very noisy, but it weighed a lot less than the other aircraft, so I was happy to let it taxi across my tarmac. I miss it.
This is what he will write. "By the 1990s, Kai Tak was one of the busiest airports in the world, but it had overwhelmed its design capacity and there was no room for expansion. In 1991 construction began on a new airport off the north coast of Lantau Island to the West of Hong Kong. The new airport was finished on 02 July 1998, and on the morning of 06 July Kai Tak closed and the new Hong Kong International Airport opened, and that was the end for Kai Tak." That is what he wrote.
Since then redevelopment of the location has proceeded slowly, not helped by the Asian financial crisis that rumbled on as the new airport was opening. As of late 2019 the area inland of the airport - the site of the pre-war Kai Tak - is still mostly a construction yard.
There are plans to build a hospital, a metro station, housing, a sports park, and even a river, because rivers are so hot right now. The men and women who are determining Kai Tak's fate are presumably trying to emulate Cheonggyecheon, the uncovered river in the heart of Seoul. Cleggypop.
Some of the tarmac survives. The only aircraft ever likely to use it again are helicopters.
"Mini Bus Parking"
The cruise terminal has not been the smash hit the authorities expected. Kai Tak is in an awkward location. The MTR station isn't finished yet, and even when it opens in early 2020 it won't link directly to Kowloon and Hong Kong island. Passengers will have to go in the other direction and change lines. The only regular public transport is the bus. There are apparently special shuttle buses when liners disembark, but it must come as a shock to go from a cruise liner to a bus. It wouldn't be much fun to walk from Kai Tak into town, and it would be impractical to walk back with shopping.
Cruise passengers want to hop off the ship and do some shopping in Sogo or Lane Crawford or Harvey Nichols in Kowloon and Hong Kong island, in which case it doesn't make sense to park the ships at Kai Tak. Why not turf out the small boats from Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter and build the terminal there? Mini bus parking seismic weed.
Part of Kai Tak's legend is Chequerboard Hill. The hill was at the landward end of the runway. It had an ILS beacon and a painted chequerboard. Pilots were supposed to follow the beacon until they saw the chequerboard and then make a sharp right turn for touchdown.
Let's zoom in and enhance.
The hill is still visible from the other end of the runway, here looming over the distinctive pink facade of the Holy Family Canossian College. The chequerboard however has been eroded by the elements and obscured by greenery. The skyscrapers are all post-1998 - when the airport was in operation buildings along the glidepath had a height restriction.
Kai Tak was of course famous for its approach. That's what you really wanted to write about. You should have started with that, you bloody idiot, but you didn't, because you didn't realise you were the writer until this paragraph. That's right! You're the writer of this blog. Not them, you. Kai Tak was famous for its approach. That's a good start. Kai Tak was famous for its approach.
For a variety of reasons aircraft were rarely directed to use runway 31, south-to-north. Airliners didn't take off over Kowloon because there was a hill in the way, and there were nasty crosswinds on the approach from the south. How did you know that? Because you looked it up. Just now, you looked it up. Google.
Furthermore in order to keep the flow of traffic moving quickly it made sense to have all the aircraft land and take off in the same direction. Kai Tak was extremely busy, especially with cargo traffic; in the last year of operation it was the world's busiest cargo airport. There's a famous photo of a 747 coming in to land at the northern end of the runway while a second 747 simultaneously takes off from the southern end.
And so pilots had to approach from south-west of Hong and ride the ILS beacon until they could see the chequerboard, then hang a right onto the runway and do a manual landing. Difficult in daylight, harder at night, even harder during bad weather, and Hong Kong has a lot of bad weather.
Surprisingly there were very few accidents. The most famous was in 1993, when a China Airlines Boeing 747 ran off the end of runway 13 into the water. There was a typhoon, and the pilot didn't brake in time. No-one was seriously hurt although the aircraft was a write-off. People tend to remember that accident because the view of a 747 resting in the water was visually striking, but it was the only time a passenger jet overshot the runway on landing. Several cargo flights and military aircraft crashed, but during the jet age there were only three fatal incidents involving passenger airliners - the botched landing in 1967 of a Thai Airways Caravelle that killed 24, an aborted takeoff in 1967 of a Cathay Pacific Convair 880 that killed one, and the crash of a Chinese Trident in 1988 that killed seven.
Legend has it that only the best pilots were allowed to operate from Kai Tak, and they had to undergo special training to do so, which might explain the relative lack of accidents. Kai Tak still has an air of glamour, although it can't have been much fun for the local residents who had to put up with the noise. Conversely the construction work for the new airport has transformed the unspoiled wilderness of the northern edge of Lantau Island into a sea of concrete and glass, so what the people of Kowloon gained in sleep the people of Lantau lost.
If you want to visit Kai Tak the easiest, most scenic way is to pop along to Kowloon Tong MTR and find the number 22 bus. It's in the basement of Kowloon Tong's shopping mall. It goes to the terminal and takes about half an hour but the ride is nice. The park itself is, as mentioned, just a patch of grass with no shade, but the terminal has plenty of benches. There's not much else to see in the local area, but I combined my visit with a trip to Bleak House Books, a cosy bookshop on the twenty-seventh floor of an office building, and the Kowloon Walled City Park, which sits on the site of the former walled city.
Kowloon's walled city was another part of Hong Kong you never had a chance to see; another part of Hong Kong fetishised by outsiders that the locals probably don't miss.
