Buckle up: 10 of the world’s most extreme airport runways

Some runways require passengers to have nerves of steel as well as a seatbelt when landing.

Tenzing-Hillary Airport, Lukla, Nepal

Lukla Airport, Nepal.Credit: Alamy

More like a high-altitude ski-jump than an airstrip, Lukla launches your dwarfed aircraft into a Himalayan void. With 7000-metre peaks ahead and a seemingly bottomless river valley below, you’re flying on a wing and a prayer-wheel.

The short, 527-metre, downhill runway services Nepal’s Solu-Khumbu region, the front door to Mount Everest. A landing here is doubly breathtaking because at 2846 metres altitude, oxygen suddenly feels like it is in short supply.

Koh Mai Si, Koh Chang Archipelago, Thailand

Tiny, jungle-clad Koh Mai Si Island appears to sport a negative Mohawk haircut. Its neighbour island, Koh Kood, didn’t have an airport so upmarket Soneva Kiri Resort looked next door to little Koh Mai Si. Bulldozers shaved an 860-metre runway – literally an “air strip” – from shore-to-shore across the low, flat island.

Resort visitors now arrive direct from Bangkok aboard a private, eight-seater aircraft, float over a wreath of islands and land with a short, sharp pull-up on Koh Mai Si’s curious tonsure.

Cocos Islands Airport

Beware the golfers.Credit: Alamy

Having landed on a pinpoint of coral, a turtle-shaped, Indian Ocean atoll, you glance out the window to notice that, incredibly, you’re taxiing along a golf course. The Cocos-Keeling Islands’ unique runway-with-fairway is home to a nine-hole golf course.

The locals tee-off weekly, unconcerned about incoming aircraft, reckoning that “if the airport manager is playing, a plane isn’t due”. However, this Australian External Territory will soon see its Gilligan’s Island-style airport maxed-up to a forward-operating base for surveillance aircraft. A grim prospect for the island’s golf tragics.

Gisborne Airport, North Island, New Zealand

Though regular trains no longer use the route, a tourist steam train still crosses Gisborne Airport’s runway occasionally.Credit: Eastland Group

Forget occasional cows or chooks on the regional runway, Gisborne Airport has trains. Two classic modes of travel collide, almost literally, on the North Island’s Pacific coast where the airport’s main runway intersects the Palmerston North-Gisborne railway line. While trains no longer regularly run on the line, a local steam train still operates rides about 15 times a year. There are grass landing strips for light planes but larger aircraft must use the sealed, 1310-metre runway, having first checked the train isn’t going to cross its path.

Svalbard Airport, Longyearbyen, Norway

Longyearbyen’s airport is carved into the permafrost.Credit: iStock

Located high in the Arctic Circle, Longyearbyen’s airstrip was carved out of permafrost. Its ingenious, 2484-metre runway sits on layers of insulation to prevent the tarmac freezing.

This is the northernmost airport in the world to handle scheduled public flights, but a local diplomatic oddity allows only Norwegian aircraft (with some Russian exceptions) to use it. Meanwhile, subpolar blizzards and more than two months of winter darkness add to the navigation hazards.

Gibraltar International Airport

Pilots landing in Gibraltar need to make sure the traffic has stopped for them.Credit: iStock

When the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1715, no-one imagined that three centuries later, the protagonists, Great Britain and Spain, would still be squabbling over tiny Gibraltar and a then-unimagined entity called an “airport”.

Until last year when UK commercial and military planes landing at “The Rock” had a more pressing concern: are the stop-lights working on Winston Churchill Avenue? The avenue, Gibraltar’s busiest road, crossed the runway and its vehicle traffic had to be held back while pilots negotiated the abbreviated 1776-metre runway that terminates with the sea. In good news for local commuters, not to mention airline passengers, the road was replaced with a tunnel last year.

Princess Juliana International Airport, Saint Maarten, Dutch Caribbean

Planes landing at the Princess Juliana Airport fly over beachgoers. Credit: iStock

Wide-body passenger jets swoop low across Simpson Bay and hedge-hop over a crowded tourist beach before dropping fast onto an abbreviated runway.

Built by the US military in 1942 on the Dutch-French island of Sint Maarten/Saint-Martin, this busy, 2300-metre airstrip provides daily thrills for tourists who gather on Maho Beach as planes roar past, seemingly just metres overhead. A graphic sign warns of jet blasts and “extreme bodily harm”.

Melaleuca Airstrip, Port Davey, Tasmania

Flying into Port Davey.

This runway in the wilderness was handbuilt in the 1950s by pioneer bushman Deny King AM. As an alternative to the 82-kilometre overland footslog into Port Davey, he cleared a bush airstrip with just a flimsy D2 bulldozer and his shovel. When it proved too short, he hewed a second, longer strip.

Now well-graded, the gravel runway at Melaleuca Inlet is used by small charter planes to deliver hikers, scientists and tourists to the great South West Wilderness. The “corduroy” timber slats of King’s earliest runway are still visible.

Kansai International Airport, Osaka, Japan

Like a floating raft: Kansai International Airport.Credit: Getty Images

From the air, Kansai International looks like a giant raft floating on Osaka Bay. This artificial island has two huge runways, one being more than four kilometres metres long. Kansai’s 1.7-kilometre, Renzo Piano-designed Terminal One is the longest air terminal building in the world.

The airport, which services Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, opened in 1994 at a cost of $US15 billion, at that time probably the most expensive civil engineering project in modern history. Four months later it survived unscathed when the massive Hanshin Earthquake hit.

Courchevel Altiport, France

Courchevel ski resort – and plane-spotter paradise. Credit: iStock

Another launch pad that resembles a giant ski-jump, the alpine airport, aka “altiport”, at the upmarket French Alps resort of Courchevel has been rated as the seventh most extreme airstrip in the world.

Located at 2000 metres altitude, its runway features an 18.5 per cent downhill gradient plus a mid-point rise and subsequent dip. It ends suddenly after just 537 metres with an elevator drop into pure alpine air. For obvious reasons, only specially-certified pilots may attempt landing here. Courchevel starred in a spectacular pre-titles sequence in the 1997 James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies.