Kai Tak Airport

Kai Tak is the airport of Hong Kong. It sits on reclaimed ground on the northern shore of Kowloon Bay, inside a city of nine and a half million people, and its runways run out into the harbour on made land. It has operated since 1925, handles about forty-five million passengers a year, is among the busiest cargo airports in the world, and has no room to grow.

It is known chiefly for its arrivals. An aircraft landing on the main runway tracks toward an orange and white checkerboard painted on the hillside at Kowloon Tsai, and then, at a few hundred feet and within sight of the windows beneath it, turns forty-seven degrees to the right to line up. The turn is flown by hand. It cannot be automated, it is unavailable in poor weather, and every pilot who flies it holds a separate qualification. It is a routine procedure carried out by professionals with an excellent record, and it is still the thing most visitors mention first.

The airport is unusual in what it mostly does. Forty-five million passengers is a large business and a modest one for a hub of this standing. The freight is world-leading. Because Kai Tak keeps no night curfew, and because the city around it has never much objected to the noise, cargo works the hours passenger airlines cannot fill. The result is an airport starved of capacity by day and fully employed by night: in commercial terms, a freight airport with a very large passenger business attached.

Two carriers call it home, and neither will concede the point. Cathay Pacific is Hong Kong’s own, founded in the territory in 1946 and controlled by the Swire house since 1948. British Airways has served Hong Kong since before the Kangaroo Route opened and treats the airport as its second home. Their slot positions are roughly even and the argument is continuous.

The airport should have been replaced forty years ago and has not been, for a reason that has nothing to do with aviation.

The name

The airport is named after a failed property development.

In the 1910s two Hong Kong businessmen, Ho Kai and Au Tak, formed a company to reclaim the shallow northern edge of Kowloon Bay and lay out a garden suburb on it. The reclamation worked. The suburb did not: the market turned, the company ran short of capital, and by the early 1920s there was a large flat parcel of new ground beside the water with nothing on it and nobody to buy it.

The government took the land. Flying had begun in the territory shortly before, and a flat coastal site beside sheltered water was exactly what an aerodrome and a flying-boat anchorage needed. The company’s name attached itself to the field, shed a letter somewhere in the process, and has outlived both partners, the suburb they intended and the company itself.

Hong Kong finds this entirely satisfactory. The territory’s front door carries the name of two men who wanted to build houses, could not, and are remembered for the ground instead of the plan.

The ground

Kai Tak occupies roughly eight square kilometres of reclaimed land and water frontage on the north side of Kowloon Bay. Its two parallel runways run north-west to south-east, out from the Kowloon shore into the harbour. Water lies on three sides. On the fourth is Kowloon, which is among the most densely inhabited ground on earth.

The constraint that governs every decision at Kai Tak was visible from the first survey and has never eased: there is water one way and a city the other, and no direction in which to expand that does not require either reclamation or demolition. Everything the airport has ever gained, it has gained from the harbour.

The level crossing

The main road to the New Territories and the Chinese frontier crosses the western end of the runway strip at grade, and road traffic stops when an aircraft moves.

This has been so since the 1950s. It has been the subject of proposals to end it since the 1960s. It was half solved in 2023, when a tunnel opened beneath the eastern end; the western carriageway still uses the crossing. Hong Kong regards the arrangement as an embarrassment, a tourist attraction and a genuine nuisance in roughly equal measure, and has funded the second half of the fix three times without building it.

The field

Regular operations began in 1925 on grass, serving the Royal Air Force and a small number of survey and mail flights. Through the 1930s Kai Tak became a stop on the imperial air routes, and the sheltered water off the field took flying boats, which for much of that decade carried more of the long-distance traffic than land aircraft did.

The airfield was modest and unpaved into the late 1930s. It was already, then, an airfield inside a city.

The occupation

Hong Kong fell in December 1941, and the Japanese administration set about enlarging the airfield, since the territory’s value in the war was as a base.

Two paved runways were laid, and the material came from the neighbourhood. Villages were cleared. The ancient Sung Wong Toi rock was broken up. And in 1943 the walls of the Kowloon Walled City were demolished and their granite carted to Kowloon Bay to push the runway further into the harbour. The work was done substantially by forced labour, under conditions that killed an unrecorded number of people.

The consequence is that the two features which most distinguish Hong Kong’s landscape from any other city’s, the airport in the middle of Kowloon and the walled Chinese enclave beside it, were joined by one act of wartime engineering. The runway aircraft still use was built out of the enclave’s walls. The enclave’s present walls, rebuilt by Chinese authorities in 1961, replace the ones lying under the aeroplanes. Hong Kong schools teach the two facts together, because neither can be explained without the other.

Rebuilding

Britain resumed administration in 1945 and inherited a larger airfield than it had lost, built by an occupier out of a neighbourhood.

Civil aviation resumed at once and grew faster than anyone had planned for. Cathay Pacific was founded in the territory in 1946 by an American and an Australian flying war-surplus transports, and passed to the Swire house in 1948. British and American carriers returned. The old field could not carry the traffic, and between 1955 and 1958 the main runway was rebuilt and driven much further out on new reclamation, reaching the shape recognisable today: 13L/31R, running from the shore into open water, approached from the north-west across the roofs of Kowloon.

The checkerboard was painted on the hillside at Kowloon Tsai as part of that work. It exists because the approach cannot be flown on instruments to the runway centreline. The hills forbid it.

The second runway

By the late 1960s one runway was not enough, and a second was built on further reclamation, opening in 1974 as 13R/31L, parallel to the first and displaced toward the harbour.

Nothing has been added since. Everything in the half-century after 1974 has been an attempt to draw more movements out of the same two strips: faster turnarounds, tighter separation, rebuilt taxiways, a new pier, and an air traffic control operation widely held to be among the most skilled anywhere, because it has had to be. The airport reached practical capacity around 2005 and has run at or near it since.

The approach

The approach to Runway 13 is the airport’s signature and is usually described loosely. It is worth setting out exactly.

The checkerboard

An arriving aircraft flies a guidance system that is not aligned with the runway. It is aligned with a point on the hillside at Kowloon Tsai, some three kilometres short and forty-seven degrees off the runway heading, where a large chequered board of orange and white is painted on the rock.

The aircraft descends on that guidance to a decision height, acquires the board visually, and then hand-flies a descending right turn of forty-seven degrees, rolling out on the centreline at roughly six hundred feet with the buildings of Kowloon City passing under the wingtip.

What the turn costs

The consequences are structural rather than merely dramatic, and they are the reason the approach appears in every business case for replacing the airport.

The turn cannot be flown by autopilot, so every landing on Runway 13 is a manual landing. It requires visual acquisition, so Kai Tak’s weather minima are far higher than a modern instrument runway’s and the airport diverts traffic in conditions that would not trouble Heathrow. And manual approaches cannot be spaced as tightly as automated ones, which caps the arrival rate directly.

The famous approach is not merely famous. It is one of the reasons the airport is full.

The qualification

Crews must hold a specific Kai Tak qualification, renewed periodically, which limits how many of an airline’s pilots may operate the route at all. For a carrier running a large Hong Kong programme this is a standing training cost and a rostering constraint, and it is one of the quieter advantages held by the two home airlines, whose crews fly the approach often enough to stay current without effort.

The board itself

The checkerboard is a protected structure, listed in its own right, which is an unusual status for a navigation aid. The listing was made in 1998, after a proposal to replace the painted board with an electronic system, and the argument that followed established that a large part of the territory regarded it as a civic object rather than equipment. It is repainted on a fixed cycle and its colours are specified by ordinance.

The terminal

The terminal is cramped, confusing, over capacity and much loved, in that order.

Its central hall dates from 1962 and has been added to rather than replaced, so the building is a sequence of eras joined by corridors and the walk to the furthest gate is long enough to be a standing joke. Passengers arriving from the newer airports of Asia find it startling.

Hong Kong has declined, repeatedly, to be embarrassed about this. The reasoning offered is that the terminal works, that its faults are the faults of a building doing more than it was designed for, and that the alternative on offer for forty-five years has been a different airport on a different island.

Passengers

Kai Tak handled approximately forty-five million passengers across two runways and a terminal extended six times and rebuilt once.

The mix is unusual for a hub of the size. There is a large point-to-point business, because Hong Kong is a substantial destination in its own right; a large regional business into the delta, the mainland and south-east Asia; and a long-haul business divided between the two home carriers. What there is comparatively little of is connecting traffic of the kind that fills the great Gulf and mainland hubs, because Kai Tak has no capacity to sell to it. An airport at its limit does not compete for transfer passengers. It carries the traffic that must come to Hong Kong and turns away the traffic that is merely passing.

Freight

Kai Tak is among the busiest cargo airports in the world, and the freight is the more interesting half of the operation.

Why there is no curfew

An airport in the middle of a residential city would ordinarily close at night, and the real constraint on air cargo everywhere is that it flies when passengers do not.

Kai Tak runs twenty-four hours. Its two runways are worked hard through the small hours by aircraft that could never obtain a daytime slot. The absence of a curfew is not an oversight and has not been seriously contested: the city grew around an airfield that was already there, the noise is coeval with the neighbourhood rather than imposed on it, and the political pressure that closes other airports at night has never assembled here.

What it actually sells

The deeper reason is the same one that explains the rest of Hong Kong’s economy.

The Pearl delta is among the most productive manufacturing regions on earth and its output must reach the world. Canton and the mainland terminals handle far more of it than Hong Kong does, more cheaply and closer to the factories. What Kai Tak supplies is not capacity, which it plainly lacks, but jurisdiction. Goods cleared through Hong Kong pass a customs, documentation and legal regime that is not the Chinese one, under courts not subject to Chinese constitutional authority.

For most ordinary freight this is worth nothing and the cargo goes through Canton. For high-value electronics, for goods moving under contracts that specify Hong Kong law, for shipments where the consignee wants a non-Chinese chain of custody, and for anything whose ownership may later be argued about, the premium is worth paying.

Kai Tak’s cargo business is the territory’s arbitration business conducted through a runway. It has the same customers, for the same reason, and the same exposure to 2047.

The airlines

Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific is Hong Kong’s airline. Founded in the territory in 1946, controlled by Swire since 1948, listed in Hong Kong, it runs the largest single operation at the airport and is regarded locally as an institution in a way few businesses are. Its crews, engineers and ground staff are drawn substantially from the territory.

Cathay faces the 2047 referendum like everything else in Hong Kong and has not restructured, hedged or relocated against it, which is sometimes described as complacency and is better described as arithmetic. Its principal assets are aircraft. They depreciate over twenty-odd years, they can be sold into a global market, and in the worst case they can be flown somewhere else on a Tuesday. An airline is the most mobile large business there is.

British Airways

British Airways has flown to Hong Kong since before the Kangaroo Route to Sydney opened in the 1930s, and does not regard it as a destination. It is the airline’s second home: a full base with locally domiciled crews on local terms, its own Asian network, and a large share of traffic that never touches London. It is the oldest of the parallel workforces that the London unions have spent thirty years objecting to.

The slots

The two carriers overlap almost completely, their slot positions are roughly even, and the resulting war is continuous and well mannered.

Cathay’s case is that a territorial carrier should have priority at its own base, and that BA’s position is an inheritance of empire rather than a commercial achievement. BA’s case is that it was flying into Kai Tak before Cathay existed, that it employs as many Hong Kong people, and that it is not less local for being owned elsewhere.

The argument has an edge neither side states directly. British Airways holds just over half the slots at Heathrow, which has been full for thirty years, and is therefore pro-expansion in principle and against every actual scheme, a position it has never been caught in and has never been believed about. At Kai Tak it occupies the same ground from the other side of the table. Cathay’s negotiators have been known to observe that BA’s arguments on slot allocation depend on which airport it is standing in.

Governance

The airport is run by the Hong Kong Airport Company, a partly privatised operator in which the territory retains a golden share and a seat.

The structure dates from a restructuring in the 1990s and was intended to raise capital for a replacement airport that was not then built. Its practical effect has been to give Kai Tak an unusual degree of commercial independence from a government that remains its largest single shareholder and its planning authority, which means that most disputes about the airport are conducted between two arms of the same public interest.

The company operates the terminal, the aprons and the ground infrastructure. It does not control the airspace, the licensing, the safety regime or the route rights, none of which are Hong Kong’s to control.

Regulation

Civil aviation in Hong Kong is regulated from London, through the Governor’s reserved power over external affairs. This is one of very few areas where the reserved powers reach into ordinary commercial life.

The logic is treaty logic rather than colonial preference. Air services agreements are concluded between states. Hong Kong is not a state, cannot sign them, and therefore reaches its destinations through the British treaty network. Safety certification, licensing and airworthiness follow the same route for the same reason. A locally run system would require the territory to renegotiate several hundred bilateral agreements as a non-sovereign party, which is not something it could do.

The arrangement is not much resented. Hong Kong’s route map is larger than a small sovereign state would negotiate for itself, and the oversight is the price of the network. The Constitution Party raises it periodically as a symptom of colonial status and gets little traction, because the people most affected are the airlines and the airlines are content.

The military share

British Forces Hong Kong holds approximately one tenth of the site, and this is resented in a way the regulatory arrangement is not.

The distinction is between law and land. Aviation oversight costs Hong Kong nothing it wants and buys it something it needs. The garrison’s tenth is the scarcest ground in the territory, held at an airport that has been full for twenty years, by a force the defence estimates themselves concede could not hold Hong Kong against China and is not configured to try.

The military’s answer is that the airfield is a designated Atlantic Treaty Organization facility, that allied access to these waters depends on somewhere to put aircraft, and that the land is not Hong Kong’s to reallocate because defence is reserved. All of this is correct and none of it persuades anybody trying to find a cargo stand.

Proposals to consolidate the military area onto reclaimed ground have foundered on cost. The standing local view is that the garrison would release the land the day a new airport opened, which returns the argument, as everything here does, to Chek Lap Kok.

Openness

The concourses at Kai Tak are open and greeting at the gate is normal, and the reason is not the Realm’s.

The United Kingdom of America arrived at its own settlement after May Day: keep the termini as they were, improve the security around them, and move the screening out of sight. Hong Kong is not American and that settlement has no application here. The territory follows British practice, which reached a similar position by an entirely different route, and the result at the terminal door looks much the same.

Two things should be said plainly about that resemblance.

The first is that Kai Tak has never been tested. The territory has no equivalent of May Day in its history, and an airport praised for open concourses it has never had to defend is being praised for a position that has cost it nothing.

The second is that the security question at Kai Tak is simply not the one other airports have. Its perimeter sits thirty kilometres from a land frontier with China, two kilometres from a Chinese-jurisdiction enclave at the Kowloon Walled City, and it operates around the clock as a freight airport whose entire commercial proposition is that goods passing through it enter a non-Chinese customs jurisdiction. What Kai Tak worries about is not who boards an aircraft. It is what is in the containers, whose documents they travel on, and which legal system will be asked about it afterwards. The screening hall is the least interesting security problem on the site.

Access

Kai Tak is in the middle of Kowloon, which makes it the most conveniently placed major airport in Asia and one of the more difficult to reach.

A dedicated airport railway runs from Central beneath the harbour to the terminal, opened in 1998, and is the fastest way in. The ordinary MTR also serves it, because the airport is simply a place in the city and the network was going to pass it regardless, which makes Kai Tak one of the few international airports reachable on a standard commuter fare. And there is the road, which is notorious: airport traffic, cross-harbour traffic and the traffic of one of the densest districts on earth pass through the same junctions, and the level crossing at the western end halts all of it whenever an aircraft moves.

Safety

Kai Tak’s record is considerably better than its reputation, and the gap between the two is the airport’s central irony.

The record

The approach looks lethal and is not. It is flown in good visibility, by specially qualified crews, to minima far more conservative than an ordinary instrument runway’s, which means that the conditions under which the difficult approach is attempted are by design the easy ones. Aircraft divert rather than try it in weather a modern airport would accept without comment.

The danger is theatrical and the discipline is real, and the discipline exists because of the danger. There has been no catastrophic accident at Kai Tak.

There have been several overruns into the harbour, which is what happens when a runway ends in water and an aircraft does not stop. The water has generally been a mercy rather than a hazard: the aircraft comes to rest in shallow harbour, the fuselage stays largely intact, and the boats are close.

1993

The defining incident is one of these.

In 1993 a wide-bodied aircraft landing in the edge of a typhoon went off the end of 13 and into the harbour, and every person aboard was taken off alive. The rescue involved harbour craft, police launches, sampans, fishing boats and a considerable number of people who simply went out to help. The aircraft sat in the water off the runway for eight days before it was lifted, photographed continuously, and those images are the ones that appear whenever the airport is written about.

It is remembered in Hong Kong as an escape rather than a disaster, which is unusual for an aviation accident and has shaped how the territory thinks about its airport. The weather minima were tightened afterwards and the qualification requirements extended. There has been no comparable event since.

Chek Lap Kok

The airport should have been replaced and has not been, and this is Kai Tak’s own unresolved question rather than a version of the territory’s.

Chek Lap Kok, an island off the north coast of Lantau, was surveyed as a replacement site in 1983. It is the obvious answer: deep water for reclamation, no residential city to fly over, no hills demanding a forty-seven degree turn, room for four runways and a curfew nobody would need. Every technical study in forty-five years has reached the same conclusion.

Eleven government proposals have been brought forward. None has been built.

The early failures were ordinary. Cost, when the territory’s finances were narrower. A dispute over whether the frontier crossings came first. Two changes of ministry. A downturn.

The later failures are all one failure, and it is not about aviation. An airport is a fifty-year asset, and Hong Kong has, at present, nineteen years of constitutional certainty. No private consortium will finance a facility whose sovereign is to be determined by referendum long before the debt matures, and no Hong Kong government has been willing to put the whole cost on the territory’s balance sheet for an asset that may accrue to a different state. The 2019 attempt, the most advanced of the eleven, collapsed at the final stage when the underwriters required a guarantee from the British government covering the outcome of the 2047 referendum, and the British government declined to give one, on the ground that guaranteeing the result of a referendum was not a thing a government could properly do.

The contrast with Cathay Pacific makes the point exactly. The same date that the airline can reasonably ignore is the date that makes the airport unbuildable, and the difference is mobility. A runway cannot be flown anywhere.

The airport now

Kai Tak is full, old, awkward, extremely good at its job, and living on a clock.

It moves forty-five million people and an extraordinary quantity of freight through a site that has not grown since 1974, using an approach that has to be hand-flown, past a garrison holding a tenth of the ground, under a regulator eight thousand miles away, with a road running across the end of the runway. Every one of those facts is an argument for building the replacement, and the replacement has been nineteen years from unbuildable for four decades.

So the aircraft go on turning at the checkerboard, at an airport everyone agrees should have been replaced before most of its current pilots were born, and the territory’s answer to why is a date nineteen years away.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Hong Kong, the territory, whose economy and whose 2047 question the airport reproduces in miniature
• British Airways, for which Kai Tak is a second home rather than a destination
• George Washington International Airport, the Realm’s capital airport
• Phoenix Sky Harbor, another airport shaped by a constraint it cannot build its way out of
• The Empire of China, across the frontier, whose delta supplies most of the freight
• The Civil Aviation Authority of America, the Realm’s own regulator, which has no writ here

Kai Tak · Hong Kong · Aviation · Land & Landscape · Unresolved Questions