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Nail-biting landings and harrowing takeoffs—buckle up when you fly into these airports.

It’s 10:45 a.m. on a cloudy day, and the crew of Druk Air flight KB205 is preparing to land at their home airport of Paro, Bhutan. Suddenly, ominous warnings start blaring, alerting them that their flight angle is all wrong and their rate of descent is far too fast. They fly a series of unconventional right-and-left banks through a narrow channel of hillsides before centering the swaying jet and putting it on the tarmac.

An emergency situation? Not quite. In fact, this is a completely normal—however nail-biting—landing at Paro Airport, set 7,300 feet above sea level. Because of the airport’s tightly cropped valley, surrounded by 16,000-foot-high serrated Himalayan peaks, this drama replays itself on every flight.

There’s a sobering saying among pilots: "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing." And it’s not until you fly into places like Paro, or Toncontìn Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, that the adage starts to make sense. Both are surrounded by mountains, and Toncontìn has one of the world’s shortest international runways; each requires a series of hard last-minute banks. It’s no wonder both give even the most seasoned pilots—not to mention their passengers—the sweats.

While Bhutan is the most extreme example—only eight pilots in the world are qualified to fly into Paro—a number of the world’s airports, from St. Maarten in the Caribbean to Madeira Airport in Funchal, can present challenges for pilots. "A lot of these airports require additional training and route familiarization because they’re so crazy," says one commercial pilot who flies international routes.

Continue reading World's Scariest Runways

• Submitted by
  
  MarthaTravels
• 11/04/09
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