{"id":24049,"date":"2026-01-24T22:33:48","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T21:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=24049"},"modified":"2026-01-24T22:33:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T21:33:48","slug":"kai-tak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/kai-tak\/","title":{"rendered":"Kai Tak"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the time of writing this post, the CMA CGM CEDRUS, the container ship bringing my mini excavator from China to France, has already left Shekou on its way to its next port of call. But this isn’t Singapore as I’d anticipated but somewhere completely different which I’ll explain in my next post. Instead I want to mention some things to do with its previous stop at Shekou.<\/p>\n

Shekou is the main port of Shenzhen which is on the Chinese mainland facing Hong Kong. I have some attachments to Hong Kong, not direct ones because I’ve never been there. However, back in the late 80s or early 90s, I can’t remember now, I had the privilege of flying a full motion flight simulator operated by the then British airline, British Caledonian. The simulator was a McDonnell Douglas DC10 and it was used to train and maintain proficiency of pilots employed by the airline.<\/p>\n

Because I already had a Private Pilot’s Licence I was allowed to do more than just ‘play’ on the simulator and in fact the instructor set me up for a night approach into the old Hong Kong Kai Tak airport which has now gone having been replaced by a huge new, modern one at Chek Lap Kok. The landing procedure for runway 13 which all pilots had to follow involved an indirect approach with an initial descent towards an illuminated red and white checkerboard mounted on a hillside. <\/p>\n

This involved the use of what was called the IGS (Instrument Guidance System). The IGS operated in a similar way to a normal ILS (Instrument Landing System) except it did not point towards the runway. Instead if you continued to fly the IGS beam you’d crash the aircraft into Checkerboard Hill so at the correct moment the pilot flying had to disconnect the aircraft’s autopilot and manually fly a descending 47 degree right hand turn to land on runway 13.<\/p>\n

I was successful in completing the landing which pleased me greatly. The procedure was both exciting and demanding and it must have been a great privilege to have been qualified to actually perform it with the lives of hundreds of passengers seated in the cabin behind you. But pilots did so on thousands of occasions with very few mishaps ever occurring. But it all came to an end in 1978 after the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong back to China and Kai Tak was closed.<\/p>\n

As I’ve mentioned many times on My Trike, I have a great interest in PC based flight simulation and although I have recently started to again do a bit of scenery design (ie digital models of airports and their surroundings which are placed in the sims) I was much more heavily involved a few years back. As a result I created highly detailed sceneries of Kai Tak for Microsoft Flight Simulators 2002 and 2004 which I uploaded onto the internet in 2003. Yup, where did 22 years go!<\/p>\n

The scenery included all of the avionics systems together with full instructions to allow simulator pilots to fly the Checkerboard Approach to runway 13 on their PCs and also included many of the iconic buildings around the airport perimeter together with their famous advertisements that were known worldwide at the time and all with full night lighting.<\/p>\n

It also included systems for what are described as AI (artificial intelligence) controlled aircraft to land at and take off from Kai Tak including ‘heavies’ such as Qantas and Air France Boeing 747s, light general aviation aircraft and also Concorde, although the latter only did one visit in 1976. The scenery took me quite a few months to create and in fact I never managed to fully complete it as it used the ‘default’ terminal buildings that were already in the sims and I never got around to creating replacements.<\/p>\n

So I was very interested when I saw that CMA CGM CEDRUS’s arrival at Sheckou would take it quite close to what had been the old Kai Tak airport site.<\/p>\n

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When I looked more closely I saw that although the airport is gone, Checkerboard Hill is still there and apparently it was recently restored back to its former glory as a memorial to the historic airport. However, closer viewing still revealed that in the intervening years since I uploaded my scenery the whole area of Kowloon that was Kai Tak and its surroundings has been totally redeveloped.<\/p>\n

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Nothing is left of the old airport. Only the spit of land on which the runway was built now remains and what was the runway has now been built on with high rise flats and commercial premises. All of those iconic buildings with their advertising boards and hoardings that once surrounded the airport are no more and their like will probably never be seen again given the style and pace of the modern world.<\/p>\n

So it was with an air of nostalgia that I managed to locate an old copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator on my PC drive which I was able to fire up for a trip down memory lane back onto the apron at Kai Tak where I took the following shots of parts of my old scenery.<\/p>\n

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While I waited an AI Government Flying Service helicopter took off from the GFS apron over on the other side of the airport and two Boeing 747s of Qantas and Air France taxied down from the main apron over the bridge to runway 31. Then a moment of pure nostalgia as the Air France 747 began its take off roll, then lifted and soared into the sky.<\/p>\n

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Flight simulation has come on a long way since 2003, a very long way. I’ve not flown into or out of Hong Kong in the latest versions but spending a few minutes in the heady days of pre 1978 Kai Tak certainly brought back a lot of old memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the time of writing this post, the CMA CGM CEDRUS, the container ship bringing my mini excavator from China to France, has already left Shekou on its way to its next port of call. But this isn’t Singapore as I’d anticipated but somewhere completely different which I’ll explain in my next post. Instead I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24049"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24062,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24049\/revisions\/24062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}