Do you have a fear of flying? If so, best to skip this story. If not, read on. A friend just sent me a video of what he termed “the worst airport in the world.” (URL below.) I am compelled to disagree, because I personally have experienced worse landing strips. As I always say, you wouldn’t believe me if I didn’t have the photos to prove it.

I never flew into Kai Tak, the old airport in Kowloon. I’m told the planes flew in between high rise apartment buildings where you could look into people’s windows and see what was on TV. The new airport in Quito is on the far side of the valley from the city, at least an hour’s drive with no traffic. I asked my guide why it was located so far from the city. She replied that the old airport was so short that planes were always flying off the far end and smashing into the mountain and killing people, which was bad for tourism. I understood her point.

Flying in heavy rainstorms in tiny planes can prove anxious to some.

I flew from Port Hardy to Klemtu (a little Indigenous village on the Inside Passage of British Columbia) in a plane so small I could reach across the seats and close the pilot’s door. It was smaller than a Volkswagen. The “office” was an old shack with a smashed front window and the front door didn’t close. It was the tail end of a heavy storm, you couldn’t see out the window for the rain, we bounced around like a pinball in an arcade game, and the passenger relegated to the storage space behind the pilot couldn’t stop barfing.

We couldn’t land because the harbour at Klemtu was full of deadwood from the storm, so we made a few passes while the pilot asked me to memorize where the logs were drifting. Aircab was the company name, they boasted 5 little bush planes, and the week after my own experience one of those planes crashed into a mountain in the fog, killing the pilot and passenger. I think it was the same plane.

This Grumman Goose is not actually sinking, although if you are a passenger it might prove disconcerting.

The Grumman Goose is the oldest commercial bush plane ever made. The last one rolled off the assembly line in 1937. I flew into the Great Bear Rainforest several times on the Goose. You could see half the rivets from the fuselage were missing and the pilot flew with one hand, the other hanging on to a strap that dangled from the ceiling, perhaps to keep the pontoons from falling off. The steering wheel was held together with electrical tape. The Goose is a “flying boat,” an amphibious craft that lands and cruises through water. The first time I flew on a Goose, I didn’t know about the “boat” part. When we landed the plane sank down into the water, which came up over the windows like we were sinking. You could hear the screaming of the very rich passengers all the way to Bella Coola.

I asked the pilot if he had ever hit a whale. He asked me what I was talking about. I told him I had received an email that “yesterday there were 7 humpback whales and their calves in the bay.” Hitting a 20 ton humpback whale in a small plane is like hitting a small island and not something you want to think about. I think he was going to hit me for not telling him.

The “airport” at Juphal is a small gravel quarry hacked off the side of a mountain at 7,0000 feet.

But nothing matches the landing strip at Juphal, a tiny village over 7,000 feet up in the Himalayan foothills in northwest Nepal, a gravel pit hacked off the top of a mountain. It was a total whiteout flying up from the plains, and you couldn’t see anything out the window until the last second when the fog suddenly cleared and the landing strip appeared. We landed with a screech of brakes and slid through loose gravel for about 50 metres, stopping just short of going off a steep canyon on the other side.

As I wrote in my book The Snow Leopard Returns, there was a civil war and we were surrounded by soldiers bearing machine guns. The pilot never shut off the engine, our bags were chucked on to the gravel along with several huge bales of rubber hose, and the plane turned and simply fell off the side of the cliff and disappeared back into the fog. The airport consisted of a falling down shack selling hard alcohol to the soldiers, and the Yeti Air office was made of mud and old pieces of rotted wood, held together by cardboard and plastic bags.

The only thing holding the Yeti Airlines office together is the sign.

I have some interesting escapades involving small marine craft we could discuss, like the time my ferry sank in a lake full of crocodiles in Cambodia, but for those with a fear of crocodiles we’ll leave that particular story for another time. Safe travels!

https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2023/08/03/most-dangerous-airport-lukla-nepal-cprog-orig-fj.cnn