Hong Kong Bids Farewell to Its Thrill Ride

HONG KONG —  Dragon Air Flight 841 from Chongqing, China, was the final airplane to perform the famous white-knuckle landing here late Sunday night. Thousands of Hong Kong residents clustered on rooftops to watch the jet skim just overhead and touch down on a runway reclaimed from the sea.

This morning, Hong Kong’s new, $20-billion international airport replaced the 73-year-old, all-thrills, no-frills Kai Tak.

“Kai Tak has truly been one of the world’s great airports,” said Hong Kong’s Civil Aviation Director Richard Siegel after the last plane landed and the last plane took off. “But tonight it’s time to say goodbye to an old friend.”

Just past midnight, with the flick of a switch, the lights of the single runway winked out, and the rush to prepare the Chek Lap Kok airport to open began in earnest. Somewhere out there, in the air on the way from New York, was a jumbo jet expecting to land at Hong Kong’s new facility at 6:20 this morning.

In that six-hour window, by air, land and sea, Hong Kong transferred 30 airplanes and a parade of ungainly airport equipment--plane pushers and moving staircases--22 miles from the old airport to the new one, so no one would miss a flight. And slightly ahead of schedule, Cathay Pacific’s nonstop flight from New York landed at Chek Lap Kok at sunrise as if the airport had been there for years.

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Many passengers and the 350,000 residents who lived under the flight path won’t miss the harrowing landings at Kai Tak that are now just memories.

Approaching aircraft were bound by a mountain on one side, the harbor on the other and one of the world’s most densely populated areas in between. Aircraft banked sharply over the South China Sea and zoomed so low over high-rise apartment blocks that passengers could see what was playing on residents’ TVs.

“Most runways are just a straight-on approach, but this one requires a lot of tight maneuvering that really stretched the capabilities of marginal pilots,” said aviation expert Jim Eckes of Indoswiss Aviation in Hong Kong. “Had an airplane ever gone down in Kowloon, where it is so crowded, you would have had one of the worst aviation disasters in history.”

Japan Airlines Capt. Shuichi Imoto is one who will miss it. The Kai Tak approach was one of the few landings that pilots had to train specially for; they were required to switch off their autopilots and guide their craft down manually.

“It’s very dangerous, so your mind is very sharp,” said Imoto, who had one of the last landings at Kai Tak and was scheduled to pilot one of the first takeoffs from Chek Lap Kok this morning. “It is one of the last exciting landings.”

At the new airport, the landing may be boringly straightforward, but Chek Lap Kok has its own excitements. The most expensive airport project in the world, Chek Lap Kok was designed to give Hong Kong an economic, political--and philosophical--boost.

“The spaces are of heroic scale,” said British architect Norman Foster, who designed the new airport, during a press tour last week. “I consider it a horizontal cathedral.”

Recalling that the mountains his helicopter landed on during a survey of the site have now been pushed into the sea to create a flat platform of reclaimed land for Chek Lap Kok, Foster noted that the airport’s creation was an epic feat of engineering as well. It is part of 10 massive infrastructure projects -- linking the airport to the city.

“I can’t think of anywhere else that would take a major international airport, close it down and open another the next day on land which had to be created,” he said.

Foster designed the new terminal as a celebration of sky, light and air. A pilot himself, he wanted to avoid the casino-like vacuum of time and place that plagues many air terminals.

From the sky, the terminal is the shape of an airplane, with the long arrival hall jutting out like wings and the aircraft gates lined up along the terminal’s body and tail. On the ground, giant windows let in sweeping views of the sea, mountains and airplanes, naturally guiding passengers toward their gates.

Hong Kong has long needed a new airport. The city is within a six-hour flight of half of the world’s population, and tiny Kai Tak handled 28 million passengers a year, turning away many potential departures because the one-runway facility didn’t have the room.

The new airport will be able to handle 35 million passengers a year. After the second runway is completed in October, Hong Kong will be able to accommodate as many as 87 million travelers a year.

British leaders conceived the new airport to create confidence and jobs in Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, which sparked a mass influx of residents here. Beijing immediately denounced the project, which it claimed was a ploy devised by the British to drain the territory’s coffers before they handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997.

Chek Lap Kok was half-completed by the time Britain and Beijing settled their feud over financing in 1995. Hong Kong paid the entire cost out of its reserves.

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The political delays were costly, however, and now analysts call the opening of the airport in the middle of the region’s economic turmoil the worst possible timing.

“The irony is that this huge public works project caused great inflation in Hong Kong, which has made it too expensive for most tourists in the region, especially now,” said aviation expert Eckes. “Now there’s a price to pay.”

Airport authorities had counted on higher fees from a growing number of tourists and cargo shippers to pay off the mega-project. The landing cost for a Boeing 747 is about $5,650, compared with about $4,230 at Kai Tak. Freight handling charges will go up about 30%, and the opening of new airports in the region has caused concerns that shippers will turn to newly opened, cheaper terminals in Shenzhen, China; Singapore; Macao; or the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.