Travellers' Checks | The opening of the ‘magnificent’ jet runway at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport
- With the new runway, jutting out into Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong could accommodate the world’s ‘greatest aeroplanes’
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Hong Kong entered the jet age on September 11, 1958, when a de Havilland Comet 4 in the livery of the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) touched down on the newly built Runway 13/31 at Kai Tak. The 2.5km runway was officially opened the next day, and the plane had jetted in from London for the occasion.
The earliest version of the Comet – the Comet 1, the world’s first jet airliner – had landed at Singapore’s Kallang Airport almost seven years earlier, in October 1951, but the older, relatively short twin runways at Kai Tak had prevented such a visit. Under a headline announcing “The Comet Arrives Today”, the China Mail excitedly noted that Hong Kong was now, for the first time, within 24 hours of London, and looked forward to scheduled Comet 4 services starting in a few months’ time – which they did.
The following day, September 12, the same paper’s front-page editorial was unreserved. “What a vista opens before the imagination as one looks down the runway of this great new work which the Governor [Sir Robert Black] so appropriately opens today. The greatest aeroplanes in the world will all land here on our magnificent man-made promontory.”
After BOAC’s 1959 launch of scheduled Comet 4 flights, American carrier Pan Am brought Hong Kong its first Boeing 707 in 1960. Japan Airlines followed later that year with a Douglas DC-8 service from Tokyo.
The runway, which had been under construction since January 1956, would become perhaps the most recognised in the world, for its unusual location and spectacular approach. It was eventually partially buried beneath the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal, whose main contractor, Dragages Hong Kong, had – through dredging and reclamation – built the runway in the 1950s.