Here's a non-US airport that has a rather neat approach:

http://lisawalton.com/images/SXM/CorsairSXM.jpg
http://www.aviationpics.de/prev/st%20maarten.jpg
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-ph.../7/1252724.jpg

I thought the exact same thing when I saw the subject line. Miami's one airport where regardless of how early my flight is, I refuse to stay anywhere nearby. I ventured into Miami Jai Alai one night--very rough crowd.

Hmm, that's my home airport and I never think of it as a difficult airport. I guess we learn something new every day. I'll look at it from a different light when I take off this Thursday.

Check out this Google terrain map and you can see the dropoff.

Supposedly some kind of bigwig was killed there on landing a while back and all sorts of improvements were made, including the impressive landing lights between 476 and 81 (shadow visible in Google's Satellite view). Anyone know the story?

Seems we just had a thread picking on MIA over on the AA forum. One of these days in the next three years the construction will be completed and MIA's fortunes and reputation should improve.

Actually, SNA doesn't feature a steep climb except in the very unusual situation (less than 1 percent of the time) that the wind is from the east. The wind almost always follows the prevailing pattern of coming in off the Pacific. Arriving aircraft have a steep descent - in Balboa Park it can look as though their wheels are right over your head - but departures are into the wind and therefore nearly all over the water.

(Today's bit of trivia: SAN is the busiest single-runway airport in the world.)

:confused:

I am pretty sure that is SOP to have a high power steep climb take off and then power back the engines over Newport for noise abatement. At least the 100+ flights I took out of SNA did it that way.

Busiest in the US, sure, but LGW has it soundly beaten for busiest in the world -- it has twice the traffic of SAN.

A while back I got a part of the story on the incident pictured in the above link from my friends at Boeing.

Before I go further, I'll point out the good news: the Air China flight from CKS had nearly 400 souls on board... they all survived because, in part, the ground speed was very low at incursion, and Kowloon Bay (near Hung Hom) is clearly very shallow. From the airport authority's operational standpoint, the bad news was that Kowloon Bay is very shallow!

The 747 sat right off the departure end of the runway, with the tail of the 747 sticking up high enough to prevent safe operations at Kai Tak. Given that the aircraft was rather quickly judged to be a writeoff, the decision was made to hastily remove the tail with whatever means available. Easier said than done. Portable power tools (I was told chainsaws were included in the mix) were first used in an abortive attempt to remove the obstruction. Boeing was ironically quite proud that to get the job done, ultimately HE had to be used to blast the tail off the fuselage!

My memory might not be correct on this one as it was about 25 years ago, but I remember the runway ending near a cliff at the Guadalajara (GDL) airport. End result (according to my memory) was that one was already fairly high up seconds after leaving the ground.

Just noticed that this was asking about US airports, but if anyone can confirm or refute my memory, I'd appreciate it.

And twice the runways, too...

That reminds me of SGU, also on a nice plateu:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=e...55103&t=p&z=14

Very :cool: backstory, UAL Trav. Thanks for sharing it. ^

April fools? That looks unreal. If true, where is it?

St. Maarten. (And yes, the pix are legit.)