Runway 13 at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport required pilots to aim directly at a hillside, then turn 47 degrees right at 680 feet. In bad weather. With no autopilot.
For 73 years, this was normal.
Kai Tak sat wedged into Kowloon City, one of the most densely populated urban corridors on Earth. The single runway jutted into Victoria Harbour on reclaimed land. There was no room for a standard approach. So pilots invented one.
Inbound on Runway 13, aircraft followed an Instrument Guidance System beam toward a mountain called Checkerboard Hill. Painted on the hillside — an orange-and-white checkerboard pattern, 12 panels wide, visible from miles out. That was the turn marker.
At 680 feet above sea level, the pilot disconnected the autopilot and hand-flew a 47-degree right bank while descending through 500 feet. The aircraft swept over apartment rooftops so close that residents could read the tail numbers. Laundry flapped in the jetwash.
Miss the turn, you hit the hill. Overshoot it, you land in the harbour.
No autopilot existed that could fly it. Every landing was hand-flown.
Crosswinds off the harbour gusted unpredictably between the high-rises. Typhoon season turned the approach into something pilots described as character-building. Airlines operating heavy widebodies — 747s, L-1011s, A340s — required their most experienced captains for the route. Cathay Pacific mandated additional simulator sessions replicating the IGS 13 approach before any pilot could fly it in command. It was a type rating in all but name.
The airport handled 30 million passengers a year through a single runway in a space where a second runway was physically impossible.
On July 6, 1998, Cathay Pacific flight CX251 — a 747-400 — made the last commercial landing on Runway 13. The next morning, Hong Kong opened Chek Lap Kok, built on a flattened island in the South China Sea.
The checkerboard is still on the hill. The paint is fading.
No pilot who flew that turn has ever forgotten it.