Flight 9

Sharing the Skinny on the “Kai Tak Heart Attack” and Other Mysteries of Runway 13

I recollect the white-knuckle fear for many passengers, while it was just another day in the office for the experienced pilots.

I have flown in and out of some very interesting, and at times decrepit, airports, but one of the most memorable flying experiences was descending into Hong Kong. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was one of the most vibrant and exciting cities to visit anywhere in the world, and even more so if you were lucky enough to land there before July 1998, which was when the old Kai Tak Airport closed. This airport had one operating runway, with a much narrower parallel taxiway adjacent to it. Landing an aircraft at Kai Tak was dubbed within the aviation industry as the “checkerboard approach.” 

At most international airports today, incoming pilots use the Instrument Landing System (ILS), which allows them to line up their approach if they are unable to establish visual contact with the airport. The ILS provides the aircraft with horizontal and vertical guidance just before landing and indicates the distance to the point of touchdown. Once established on an approach, the pilot follows the ILS approach path indicated by the localizer and descends along the glide path to the decision height. This is the height at which the pilot must have an adequate visual reference to the landing environment in order to decide whether to continue the descent to a landing or to otherwise execute a missed-approach procedure.

Due to the numerous mountains and skyscrapers located to the north of Kai Tak Airport, and its only runway jutting out into Victoria Harbor, an ILS system was not used and instead the authorities incorporated a Localizer Directional Aid (LDA), which is used in places where due to terrain or other factors the localizer antenna is not aligned with the runway it serves. The landing approach using Runway 13 at Kai Tak was world-famous, and to this day, it is still talked about regularly by airport enthusiasts.

To land on Runway 13, an aircraft first took a descent heading northeast. The plane would pass over the crowded Victoria Harbour and the very densely populated areas of Western Kowloon. The LDA lined the aircraft up directly into a mountain. Upon reaching a small hill above Kowloon Tsai Park, marked as a visual reference point with a large aviation orange-and-white checkerboard used on the final approach, the pilot needed to make a 47-degree visual right turn to line up with the runway and complete the final leg. The aircraft would be just one mile from touchdown, at a height of about 1,000 feet when the turn was initiated. Typically, the plane would enter the final right turn at a height of about 800 feet and exit at a height of about 200 feet to line up with the runway. This demanding maneuver became nicknamed among the aviation cognoscenti as the “Hong Kong Turn” or the “Checkerboard Turn.”

Landing on Runway 13 at Kai Tak Airport was also often referred to as the “Kai Tak Heart Attack.” As the plane approached the checkerboard and made its final right turn, one would see large, dense apartment complexes of Kowloon passing by outside the aircraft windows. I always felt as if I could reach out and touch them. 

I flew into Kai Tak many times and I always knew if someone seated next to me was on his or her first trip to Hong Kong because they would invariably believe we were crashing! Thinking about it today, I realize it is amazing there were so few accidents. The reason may be that any pilot who flew into Kai Tak had to go through rigorous flight-simulator training specific to this airport’s approach.

It was unique.