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Sure it has a lovely new $10.5 million dollar terminal, but this picturesque airport between Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks still ranks as a dangerous one thanks to a lack of control tower and the need for pilots to navigate numerous obstructions while landing.
Any airport that requires special pilot training easily makes a list of the most dangerous airports in the world. Aspen’s airport, according to the Telegraph, fits the bill thanks to its steep approach and mountains surrounding the runway which force those specially trained pilots to land and take off in opposite directions while using the single runway.
Not surprisingly, another Colorado Rocky Mountain airport is ranked as one of the most dangerous. Telluride’s Regional Airport sits over 9,000 feet above sea level, making it the highest commercial airport in North America. There are huge cliffs at both ends of the airport’s single runway, and strong mountain winds in the cold of winter, all serving to make landing an airplane in Telluride a dangerous proposition for even experienced pilots.
You might think that King Kong is dangerous but his “native island” (Saba provided the silhouette for Skull Island in the original King Kong film) in the Dutch Caribbean (a 15-minute flight from St. Maarten) has an airport that incites more fear than the famous gorilla ever could. Sitting precariously on the edge of a cliff, this tiny and narrow 396-metre runway is scary enough to have even the most seasoned traveller clutching the armrest during a landing on this gem of a remote Caribbean island known for stellar SCUBA diving.
Per a Forbes report, this regional airport serving the 12 million people of Sao Paulo is “located in a heavily built-up part of the huge city and gives you the impression that you are scraping the tops of high rise buildings as you land.” In addition to the busy metropolis rising up from the ground to make this airport one of the world’s most dangerous, “the runways are considered the most slippery in the world and have resulted in a large number of fatal crashes.”
Built upon a layer of permafrost, Svalbard is the northernmost airport in the world with scheduled public flights. Due to the lack of runway lights, flights are only permitted during daylight, which is fine when there are 24-hours of it during summer days but not when the opposite reality takes hold in winter. Because this dangerous airport was deemed to be not in line with international standards, Svalbard’s Longyearbyen Airport lost its international designation in 2017 meaning the only way to reach this remote Arctic Circle airport, and to experience the frequent polar bear sightings on the archipelago, is from Tromsø or Bergen on mainland Norway.
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Source: RD.com
