Low-flying memories

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-17 10:47

Sung remembers landing one night 20 years ago.

"It was only then that I realized why Hong Kong was called 'The Pearl of the Orient'," he says.

"With all the lights on, the city transformed itself into an iridescent land with one mini-twinkle from each household window."

The experience was thrilling for both passengers and people watching the planes from their high-rise apartments.

But aircraft accidents in Hong Kong and around the world forced the authorities to rethink the airport's position.

In 1988, a Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) aircraft ran off the runway and into the Victoria Harbor causing major concern.

But in 1992, after a Boeing 747 crashed on the outskirts of Amsterdam killing dozens of the people, local residents demanded Kai Tak's removal.

"But Kai Tak was where it was long before any apartment building was built and the local community moved in," Sung says. "So people were encroaching on the land of the airport, rather than the other way around," he says.

However spectacular the Kai Tak landing felt, it was life in Hong Kong after the landing that made the airport such an important part of people's memory.

In the 1950s and 1960s, movie industry people from the mainland set up studios in the abandoned parts of the airport.

Immigrants from other parts of Asia also settled in the vicinity. Kowloon today has some of the best Thai restaurants in Hong Kong.

"In a sense, Kowloon is the backyard and the canteen of Kai Tak," says Sung.

And Kai Tak was the stage on which numerous human dramas were played out.

Amid the prevailing uncertainty before Hong Kong's handover to China, the airport's departure lobby witnessed an exodus of people seeking greener pastures.

On June 30, 1997, the day before the official handover, Sung returned to Kai Tak from his family's newly-adopted home in Canada. He wanted to live history and spent the night under the airport's giant clock.

But by this time, the fate of Kai Tak had already been sealed and the new Hong Kong International Airport was nearing completion.

In the months leading up to Kai Tak's closure, people thronged the nearby streets and top of apartment buildings, hoping to capture, on mind as well as on film, the last planes landing.

On July 6, 1998, Kai Tak closed. The last commercial flight departed at 00:20 sharp and was piloted by a man, who retired on that very same flight.

For the past decade, the airport has languished and faded out of public view, until recently when the government pledged more than 7 billion HK dollars to build a new cruise terminal and various low-density residential developments and community facilities at the site.

"When Ho Kai and Au Tak first raised land from the sea, they planned to build on it a garden city," says Sung.

"And that's what the government has promised for Hong Kong people.

"If you come to think of it, history has taken a fascinating detour."

But despite the change, Sung says nothing can quite replace the charm and magic of the original Kai Tak.

"After Kai Tak, Hong Kong is no longer what it used to be," says Sung, who once worked at the new airport.

"I'm very proud of the one we are having now, but you are not going to step out of the plane and right into the middle of a bustling neighborhood."

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