Kai Tak in Hong Kong: chronicle of a legendary airport

An airport in the middle of a city of millions, a runway pointing like a finger into the harbor, and jumbos banking low over the rooftops of Kowloon: Kai Tak in Hong Kong is for many aviation fans the epitome of a cult airport. Behind the famous checkerboard approach, however, lies a story of more than 70 years – from a failed real estate project through war and occupation to a hub that burst at the seams in the 1990s. This article tells the chronicle of the airport: how it came about, how it grew, why it had to go and what is left of it today.

Kai Tak at a glance

Kai Tak was Hong Kong’s airport from 1925 to 1998. It lay on the north shore of Victoria Harbour at Kowloon Bay, the densely built-up districts of Kowloon City bordered it to the west, and mountains rose to the north and northeast. In its last four decades it had only a single runway, the 13/31, which jutted out into the bay on reclaimed land. The codes HKG and VHHH, which Kai Tak carried, are now used by its successor Chek Lap Kok.

How the famous approach to runway 13 worked in detail is explained in the article Kai Tak: the checkerboard approach. You’ll find the compact key facts with a timeline in the profile Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. This article is about the history of the airport as a whole.

A name from a failed construction project

At the beginning there was no airport, but a real estate plan. In 1912 the businessmen Ho Kai and Au Tak founded a company that wanted to reclaim and develop land in Kowloon Bay. The project was not a success, and the government of the British colony took over the site. What remained was a flat, open area by the water – ideal for early aviation – and a name composed from the names of the two founders.

In 1924 Harry Abbott opened a flying school on the site. According to Hong Kong’s Civil Aviation Department (CAD), the first documented flight took place on Chinese New Year’s Day 1925, which is why 1925 is considered the founding year of Kai Tak. In the following years the grass field served the Royal Air Force and several flying clubs.

Infrastructure was added step by step:

• 1928 a concrete slipway for seaplanes was built into the bay.
• 1930 the administration appointed the first aerodrome manager, as aviation was then still part of the Harbour Department.
• 1935 the first control tower and an aircraft hangar followed.
• On March 24, 1936 the Imperial Airways aircraft “Dorado” from Penang landed. With it, public passenger air traffic from Kai Tak began.

If you’re interested in the aircraft of this pioneering era, the article Recognizing vintage aircraft in the sky is a good introduction.

War, occupation and reconstruction

In December 1941 the Japanese army conquered Hong Kong. From 1942 the occupiers expanded Kai Tak into a military airfield, using Allied prisoners of war as labor. Two concrete runways were built, one in direction 13/31 and one in direction 07/25. For the building material they had the wall of the Kowloon Walled City and the historic rock Sung Wong Toi torn down – an intervention in the city’s history that is still remembered today. Toward the end of the war, air raids severely damaged the facility.

After 1945 civil air traffic quickly picked up again. On May 1, 1946 the Civil Aviation Department was founded, which operated Kai Tak to the end. In the same year the young Cathay Pacific began operations with aircraft of the type Douglas DC-3 – the start of the airline that shaped Kai Tak for decades. The story of the sturdy twin-engine aircraft is told in the article Douglas DC-3. The field also remained in military use: the Royal Navy had usage rights until 1978.

As early as the early 1950s, a completely new airport at a different site was being considered. But the plans were dropped for financial and political reasons. Instead the government decided to expand Kai Tak – with a master plan approved in 1954.

1958: the runway in the harbor

The core of the master plan was an entirely new runway. From 1955 a causeway was built out into Kowloon Bay, and in 1958 runway 13/31 with a length of 2,529 meters went into service on it. Officially the airport had been called Hong Kong International Airport since the mid-1950s, but in everyday use it remained Kai Tak.

The location in the water solved a space problem but created exactly the conditions that later made Kai Tak famous. To the southeast the runway opened freely onto the harbor. At the northwest end, by contrast, lay Kowloon City and behind it the mountains – a straight approach to runway 13 from there was impossible.

With the era of widebody jets the runway was extended again. The extension was finished in 1974, but because of the construction of the airport tunnel at the northwest end, the full length of 3,390 meters was only available from December 31, 1975. According to the CAD, the longer runway served the long-haul needs of the 31 airlines then flying to Hong Kong.

Year	Runway and approach	Context
1942	two concrete runways 13/31 and 07/25	expansion under Japanese occupation
1958	new runway 13/31 in the harbor, 2,529 m	foundation of the later Kai Tak
1974	Instrument Guidance System for runway 13	start of the checkerboard approach in its familiar form
1975	runway 3,390 m, fully usable from December 31	designed for long-haul with widebody jets

The legendary checkerboard approach

Until 1974, runway 13 was approached by sight. Then air traffic control installed an Instrument Guidance System (IGS) – technically related to an ILS, with the crucial difference that the localizer beam was offset by about 47 degrees from the runway axis. That made it possible to fly an instrument-guided approach to runway 13 even in poorer visibility, at least up to the visual turn.

The sequence in brief:

It was exactly this turn over the apartment blocks of Kowloon City that delivered the pictures that made Kai Tak immortal among spotters: widebody jets banking, with neon signs, clotheslines and street traffic below. For pilots the landing counted as one of the most demanding in worldwide scheduled service, especially since gusty wind from the mountains and typhoons could make the final phase even harder. What crosswind landings mean technically, we explain separately. The opposite direction 31 came in from the southeast over the water and could be flown with ILS.

The detailed look at procedures, altitudes, today’s Checkerboard Hill and the spotter scene of back then is given in the article Kai Tak: the checkerboard approach.

Growth to the limit

From the 1960s Kai Tak grew in stages with the traffic. The passenger terminal was completed in 1962, and the old terminal building was torn down in 1965. On April 11, 1970 the first Boeing 747 landed – a type that shaped the airport’s image for the following almost three decades. In 1976 the Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminal began operating, and in the same year secondary radar arrived.

The further expansion stages according to the CAD:

• 1981: Phase 4 of the passenger terminal is finished.
• 1984 to 1988: Phase 5 raises the design capacity to 18 million passengers a year.
• 1991: A second cargo terminal goes into operation, and cargo capacity rises to 1.5 million metric tons a year.
• 1992: The east apron gets four positions for the Boeing 747-400 and an area for general aviation.
• 1994: The south apron grows by eleven 747 positions, and the terminal is now designed for 24 million passengers.

That helped only to a limited extent. In 1996 Kai Tak handled about 29.5 million international passengers and 1.56 million metric tons of international cargo. That put the airport third in the world for international passengers and first for international cargo – with a single runway and a terminal built for far fewer people.

Who called Kai Tak home

Kai Tak was the home base above all for Cathay Pacific, plus Dragonair and the cargo airline Air Hong Kong. Cathay Pacific and Air Hong Kong now belong to the Cathay Group; the Dragonair brand (later Cathay Dragon) no longer exists. On top of that came airlines from all over Asia, Europe, North America and Australia. For spotters the mix of jumbos of different generations, trijets and early long-haul twinjets was a feast. How to tell the 747 variants apart in old photos is shown in the guide Recognizing the Boeing 747-100 to 747-8.

Living with the airport in the city

A major airport in the middle of a residential area has consequences, and at Kai Tak they were felt everywhere:

• Night curfew: Between 11:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. operations rested. All traffic crowded into the remaining hours – one reason for the chronic overload. What night flight rules look like at German airports is covered in the article on the night flight ban.
• Building heights: Strict height restrictions applied to buildings in Kowloon because of obstacle clearance. They only fell after the closure, and the area’s skyline has changed greatly since.
• Noise and exhaust: With the growing housing around the field, aircraft noise and engine exhaust became a permanent conflict.

Accidents are part of the story too. The most serious was the crash of a US Marine Corps KC-130F in August 1965 with 59 dead. The best known, however, is the incident of November 4, 1993: an almost new Boeing 747-400 of China Airlines overran the end of runway 13 into the harbor as flight 605 during Typhoon Ira. All 296 people on board survived.

The replacement: Chek Lap Kok and the Airport Core Programme

By the end of the 1980s at the latest, it was clear that Kai Tak could not keep growing. A second runway could not be fitted into the bay, and neither night curfew nor building heights could be negotiated away. On October 11, 1989, Governor David Wilson announced the Airport Core Programme: ten major projects around a new airport at Chek Lap Kok off the north coast of Lantau Island.

The package included the Tsing Ma Bridge as part of the road and rail link to Lantau, the airport railway – today the Airport Express and Tung Chung Line – and a large land reclamation in West Kowloon. Total costs ended up at around 160 billion Hong Kong dollars. The operator of the new airport became the Airport Authority Hong Kong, while the Civil Aviation Department remained responsible for air traffic control and as the regulatory authority.

The last night: July 5 to 6, 1998

The move did not happen step by step but in a single night. On the evening of July 5, 1998, at 11:38 p.m., Dragonair KA841 from Chongqing, an Airbus A320, touched down on runway 13 as the last landing. Shortly after midnight, Cathay Pacific CX251 took off with a Boeing 747-400 to London Heathrow – the last scheduled departure. At 1:05 a.m., a Cathay Airbus A340-300 left the field as a ferry flight toward Chek Lap Kok.

In the control tower, the director of the civil aviation authority, Richard Siegel, bade farewell with the words “Goodbye Kai Tak, and thank you”. After that, vehicles and equipment rolled in a large convoy under police escort to the new site. On July 6 at 6 a.m., Cathay Pacific flight 889 from New York landed as the first aircraft at the new airport.

It wasn’t quite over for Kai Tak right away, though: because the IT of the new cargo center initially failed, the government temporarily reactivated the old cargo terminal once more, with the substitute code VHHX.

What is left of Kai Tak today

The former airport site is one of Hong Kong’s major urban development areas. The old passenger terminal was torn down in the mid-2000s. Since then a new district has grown:

Since	What	Where
2013	Kai Tak Cruise Terminal	at the tip of the former runway
2013	first public housing estates	on the former airport site
2020	MTR station Kai Tak	in the new district
2021	Kai Tak Sky Garden	on parts of the runway and apron
2025	Kai Tak Sports Park with a stadium for about 50,000 spectators	on the former airport grounds

The shape of the peninsula on which the runway lay is still easy to recognize today. And on the hillside in the north of Kowloon, the checkerboard shines again: the Checkerboard Hill was repainted in its original colors on the west and south sides in 2020/21.

Spotting in Hong Kong today

Air traffic has run at Hong Kong Chek Lap Kok Airport since 1998. Cathay Pacific is still the defining airline there, joined by HK Express, Hong Kong Airlines and many international carriers as well as a large share of cargo. Which viewpoints around Lantau work is described in the guide Plane spotting in Hong Kong.

There is no replacement for the approach over Kowloon. If you’re looking for spectacular low passes, you’ll find inspiration in the bucket list of spotting spots worldwide. And how places like Kai Tak have shaped the hobby over decades is something you can read in the history of plane spotting.

Conclusion

Kai Tak was the result of many compromises: a failed construction project as a launch site, a runway that was built into the sea for lack of space, and an approach that the mountains forced. It was precisely these compromises that made the airport unique. Over decades it grew with Hong Kong until in 1996, with a single runway, it was among the busiest airports in the world – and finally became history in one night in July 1998. What remains are photos, memories, a new city district and a brightly painted hillside above Kowloon.