May 4, 2021 Notorious Airports

The Liberty Gazette

May 4, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: I read the headline, The Ten Most Dangerous Airports in the World, and I roll my eyes. There are challenging airports, no doubt, but what in that writer’s opinion makes an airport THE MOST DANGEROUS? 

I love writing descriptive prose about what pilots see, what factors contribute to their judgement, and how they handle unusual situations. A Hawker student once said to me, “You really like to make people think outside the box,” and it’s true. The aviation life is filled with if this—then what? My job is preparing pilots to handle stressful situations. All professional pilots go through regular training to cover as many different contingencies as possible, so there should be no dangerous airports. 

Actually, the most dangerous airport could be the airport they know the best, the one with which they are the most comfortable. Complacency is one of the biggest problems facing pilots. The system, training, and the standard operating procedures pilots follow are in place to combat this. But letting down one’s guard even a little can lead down a path where more mistakes can contribute to a tragic situation. Comparatively, when landing at a so-called dangerous airport, pilots are on high alert, paying closer attention, resulting in fewer mistakes. 

During the summer flying season in Antarctica for instance, large jets and turboprops land on runways plowed out of the snow. In some instances, the airplanes land on glaciers that may or may not have monstrous crevasses a thousand feet deep underlying a blanket of snow. There are procedures for the pilots of these aircraft to mitigate most of those dangers. They are always ready for the possibility of going around and not landing. They don’t commit themselves to fate.

I’ve flown into my share of interesting places, like La Carlota Airport, a/k/a General Francisco de Miranda Air Base, right smack in the middle of Caracas, Venezuela’s east side. Because it sits in a black hole in a mountain valley with tall buildings on all sides, it was only open during daylight. Landing there required a well-thought-out plan in case we needed to abort and go around. The same was true of takeoffs. My favorite image wasn’t the awe-inspiring view out the window. It was glancing at my co-pilot’s eyes getting wider as we descended below the balconies and terraces of those buildings and hillsides on their first flight there. 

Similarly, the approach into Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport had airliners pointing the nose at a checkerboard painted on the side of a mountain. Just before reaching it, they turned sharply to line up with the runways, nearly scraping the tops of buildings as they landed in extreme crosswinds. The operations produced a highly technical workload, but for all the difficulties, the few incidents that happened were primarily caused by mechanical problems. Eventually, a new airport was built further from the city, and Kai Tak was closed. 

I don’t regard any airport specifically as dangerous, and all airports deserve the pilot’s full focus. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com