Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport: photographer recalls ‘the golden years’ and its final days
- In 1998, photojournalist Birdy Chu set out to record the last months of the airport and the airliners flying low over the city on their final approach
- ‘I loved that iconic landing,’ says Hongkonger, who has shot thousands of photos of Kai Tak, of which 45 are on show in Kowloon near site of airport
Photographer Birdy Chu Shun shot thousands of images of Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport in 1998 before it closed in July that year and operations moved to the glitzy Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok.
Like many Hongkongers, he has fond memories of Kai Tak, one of the most difficult airports in the world to pilots to fly in and out of, and which had started as a humble airfield in 1925. Anyone who landed there has a story about airliners’ hair-raising descents that came close to buildings on the approach to the runway.
“I loved that iconic landing,” says Chu, a Hongkonger, who landed there six times. And he loved the airport.
“There are so many unforgettable memories surrounding Kai Tak. It has almost legend-like status, like a myth,” says Chu, a former photojournalist who now lectures in media and communications at the City University of Hong Kong.
Forty-five photographs Chu shot in the airport’s final months of operation are on display until April 22 in an exhibition, “Kai Tak Airport Visual Retrospective”, at the Mikiki shopping mall in San Po Kong, Kowloon, a venue that’s fittingly close to the site of the former airport.
