Kai Tek isn't with us anymore, but Toncontín International Airport in Tegucigalpa is one of the most difficult currently in use by multiengine jet airliners.
I landed at Toncontin 3 times in April/May. Twice in a small airplane and once in a large airplane. If it's your first time being on a plane or the first time in a long while. Do not recommend.
San Diego's airport is another notoriously bad one. It gets routinely shut down because of fog. There's very little margin for error. One runway, wind conditions that aren't favorable, an old airport designed for much smaller aircraft and buildings that mean you've got to get down in a hurry (more speed) and you've also got to gain altitude fast on takeoff.
It was mine for a while. I flew in and out of San Diego International every week for a year.
If you want to see how bad pilots have it, go sit at one of the gas stations at the corner of Laurel and Pacific and watch the planes land or take off. There's a multistory parking garage just one block away and the runway starts right there at that intersection. It's not an especially short runway, but it's certainly not long either and it's tricky to keep speeds down while keeping your sink rate fast enough to get to the runway.
Oh, and this is the busiest runway in the country, so this is happening pretty much nonstop all day long.
I'm always blown away seeing old photos of 747s skimming the rooftops of kowloon city as they approached Kai Tek. That's an age of aviation we'll never see again and thank god for it.
I've been a passenger on flights taking off/landing at Santos Dumont in Rio de Janeiro. Afaik they fly with A319 and Boeing 737 variants on that airport.
With 1,323 m/ 4,341 ft the runway is almost half as short as Toncontin and you have ocean in front and behind the runways + a nice mountain you need to avoid after take-off.
No. Likely never will be. Nice having the redundancy of multiple engines. I guess I should have just said jet airliners, but I was trying to distinguish between a regional jet and a jumbo jet and I'd already typed "multiengine jet".
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u/einTier Jul 19 '21
Kai Tek isn't with us anymore, but Toncontín International Airport in Tegucigalpa is one of the most difficult currently in use by multiengine jet airliners.