Most dangerous/exciting/difficult US airports?
 

Not counting the smallest airports, there is for example INN in Austria which is difficult for pilots and require special training. Which airports would be similar in the US?

I know there is LGA for example with short runways, as with SNA (which also features a steep climb) and BUR. SAN has a parking garage that will have some travellers on their toes when flying there. I've heard someone mention BHM though I don't know why that one should be added to the list.

What other airports are there?

ASE (Aspen, CO)

What about Washington National? Turning approach.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8800/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

What about MDW? I've never flown out of LGB but I've heard it also has a steep climb.



I am not a pilot so my knowledge is limited.

Juneau...... you miss the turn you hit the mountain.

I heard from a friend that Colorado Springs was usually a white knuckle adventure.

OK, sorry not a US airport, but relevant...
OK, shorty history lesson here. After WWII, and West Berlin was starving d/t the Red Army blockades, the Allies started the Berlin Air Drop. They took off and landed from Tempelhof. I think it was because of the height of the surrounding buildings and the Red Army all over the outskirts.

Good one.

Drifting off-thread even further ...

Another non-US airport renowned for its difficult approach is the now-mothballed Kai Tak (Hong Kong). Check out airliners.net or jetphotos.net for a wealth of pictorial documentation on the matter.

ETA: Here are a few of my faves:

http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=11253
http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=48980
http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=163466
http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=48640

As for exciting perhaps SFO with the close parallell approach would be a candidate?

RKV, although not in the US, is another one that requires additional certification.

I was always thrilled going in and out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska. In over the ocean, out over the ocean, short runway, lovely weather.

Dangerous/exciting/difficult.....I thought this thread was going to be about the crowds and/or crime. :cool:


I'll go with MIA.

I have to admit, that one kinda surprises me (although I'm not a pilot, so it's a laypersons opinion). Other than something like being notorious for wind shear like Stapleton seemed to be, I wouldn't think there's much there to cause an issue. (However, my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I used to live pretty close to the approach path for this airport.)

I asked a similar question to a veteran pilot and he said the trickiest airport he was familiar with was Scranton/Wilkes Barre (AVP) since it's very mountainous and has a steep drop off at the end of the runway. I've never flown there, but I've seen the impressive landing lights from the highway.

I've also heard complaints about the former Cleveland and Toronto airports (in the lake).

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.)

:confused::confused::confused: Does SAN have 0.5 runways? :D

Wow! This one wins the price for me!

Looks just like CLD.

Sedona (Arizona) Airport (SEZ) is another butte-top airport - see this topo map. What a beautiful city, too!

The other "fun" thing about SNA -in addition to the steep climb, they cut back the engines during the ascent in order to lower the noise as they fly over the expensive homes of Newport Beach. Gives the slight feeling of a free fall. No big deal if you are used to it or expecting it, but very often you hear gasps of air from a fellow passenger somewhere on the plane and you know it is their first time flying out of John Wayne.

Nowadays, they sometimes make a pre-takeoff announcement...

You are confusing SNA with SAN. SNA - steep ascent and engine cutback over Newport Beach. SAN, steep descent.

That's got the In-N-Out on Sepulveda beat...:eek:

ORh (Worcester, MA) was a bit of an odd one - not so much take offs, but landings - planes usually landed west or north-west. What makes it odd is that most of the surrounding areaa is a little under 600ft elevation, while the airport itself sits at 1000 ft on a hill.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=e...=14&iwloc=addr

It can be on a windy day due to proximity to the mountains.

I can vouch for that - I have been on that beach!

Another notoriously short runway is at EUG - although I think they now have all RJ's, so less effect.

Another piece of trivia about short runways: when AA first started the SJC-NRT route with MD-11's the runway was not long enough for a fully loaded and fueled bird to take off. On those days, the plane was lightly fueled and then flown to OAK for full fueling. But somehow, I never got 500 miles for the extra segment.:p