Pilots used to call it the checkerboard approach. On final to runway 13 at Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak airport, you would aim a 747 directly at a hillside painted with a giant orange and white target, then bank 47 degrees to the right at about 700 feet to line up with a runway that ran into Victoria Harbour. Passengers in window seats could see laundry drying on apartment balconies. That was scheduled commercial aviation, every day, for 73 years.

The airport in the city

Kai Tak opened in 1925 as a small grass strip on land originally reclaimed by two businessmen named Ho Kai and Au Tak for a failed housing development. The Royal Air Force took it over during the war, and by the early 1950s it was already too small for postwar traffic. Hong Kong built a single runway extending into the harbour in 1958, and that runway, designated 13/31, became the only commercial airport for the colony.

Geography made every approach into runway 13 unforgettable. You could not fly straight in. The hills rose on the north side, Kowloon’s apartment blocks pressed close on the west, and the harbour blocked any further extension. Pilots flew the IGS (Instrument Guidance System) approach toward the Checkerboard Hill VOR, watched for the painted target, and executed a hand-flown 47-degree right turn at low altitude. There was no autoland on that runway. You got it right or you went around.

By the mid-1990s Kai Tak was handling close to 30 million passengers a year on a single runway, with adjacent neighbourhoods experiencing some of the highest aircraft noise levels ever recorded in a major city. Hong Kong’s solution went much further than a longer runway. It built an entirely new airport on a flattened island and reclaimed seabed off Lantau, twenty miles from the city centre. Chek Lap Kok (HKG) opened on July 6, 1998. The last Cathay flight out of Kai Tak departed earlier that morning. The airport closed at midnight, and the controller signed off with “Goodbye, Kai Tak, and thank you.”

Cathay Pacific, founded in 1946 by an American war pilot and an Australian, grew up alongside that old runway. Today HKG is the world’s busiest cargo airport and the home base for Cathay’s long-haul network across five continents.

How Hong Kong plays in SkyChart

Hong Kong is one of 103 hub cities in SkyChart’s 496-city network. In the game’s economic model it carries an economic_value of 95 (the highest tier) and a tourist_appeal of 90. That puts it in the same bracket as London, New York, Shanghai, and Tokyo. The hub flag is what unlocks expanded slot allocations, more daily frequencies, and the lounge contracts that drive premium-cabin yields.

What makes Hong Kong play differently from the other top-tier hubs is its position. It sits roughly 1,250 km from Taipei, 1,800 km from Tokyo, 2,500 km from Singapore, 3,800 km from Mumbai, and 9,600 km from London. Almost every Asian capital is within reach of a 1960s-era 707 or DC-8, but London and the US east coast require 1970 or later equipment with the range and fuel economy of a 747-200 or DC-10. In the early game eras, Hong Kong is where you build a regional Asian network. Once the widebody fleet arrives, the same hub becomes a long-haul gateway you fight to keep.

The aircraft progression matters too. SkyChart models 66 aircraft from 1925 to 2095, and the Hong Kong story tracks the real one. Flying boats and DC-3 derivatives in the 1940s, the first jets in the 1960s, the 747 era from 1970 onward, the 777 and A380 in the 2000s. If you want to roleplay Cathay, you fly the same fleet they did, on the same routes, with the same range constraints.

Strategic takeaway

The trap with Hong Kong is treating it like another generic high-EV hub and racing to add long-haul routes from year one. The city’s value in the first two decades of a campaign comes from regional density rather than reach. Twenty turboprop frequencies a day on a 1,500 km route to Taipei or Manila will usually outperform two long-hauls to Europe in the same era, because slot fees scale roughly linearly while connecting traffic scales closer to the square of route count.

Once the 747 unlocks in 1970, the Hong Kong hub flips from regional anchor to transpacific bridge. Players who plan that transition in advance keep their slots and their connecting waves. The ones who hold turboprops on routes the long-haul aircraft can now serve nonstop tend to lose those routes to competitors with better unit economics.

Wishlist SkyChart on Steam

SkyChart: Airline Executive is a deep airline management simulation spanning 90 years of aviation history, from the flying boats of 1930 to the modern jet age. It’s the spiritual successor to Aerobiz that fans have been waiting 30 years for.

→ Wishlist SkyChart on Steam

Or play the alpha on itch.io right now.