Happy Landings....

When I first came to Tawau, Sabah in 2000 to see my wife’s family, it was quite an unforgettable experience. In those days, Tawau International Airport was situated very close to the town, with squatter smallholdings at one end, and a huge mosque with its sprawling graveyard at the other. Now my advice to Malaysia Airports Sdn. Bhd. is this: Never build an airport with a graveyard at the end of the runway! You might give the pilot the wrong idea!!!

Of course, the authorities had no choice – they had to put up with what they had available. I daresay the airport dated back to the 1950s or even earlier, and it looked like the sort of place where Allied (and perhaps Japanese!) warplanes may have landed during World War Two.

This element of danger and adventure could be experienced to the full each and every time one landed at the old Tawau airport, especially if one was flying in a Boeing 737. You see, the thing about the old airport in Tawau was this: the runway was perfectly fine for handling turboprop planes like Fokker F50s and De Havilland Twin Otters. That’s because these aircraft had relatively short take-off and landing runs.

But the Boeing 737, that’s another matter entirely. The runway was just a little bit short of the ideal length for a 737 to take off and land with assured safety. I think the technical term for this in the Air Force is something like “barely within the safety margins”. So what this meant was that landing at the old Tawau airport was quite a ride. If you approached from the North, you had a small mountain to one side of the aircraft, a residential tower block on the other (where, ironically, we were staying!) and a runway ahead of you that wasn’t quite long enough. Or maybe only just long enough.

So, after a final approach that took you just a few metres over the rooftops of some houses, you touch down. Now remember I said that the runway was rather short. So the pilots, who must have had arm muscles like Olympian gods, would pull back so hard on the brakes that your back pressed into your seat, threatening to crash backwards into the row behind.

During this nerve-wracking gravitational pull, all kinds of things flash through your mind, like “I wonder if my life insurance policy is up to date?” or “I hope I’m wearing clean underwear” or “when is this bastard going to stop?” And then, just as violently as it began, the horror ends, and the plane stops, and everyone on the plane is thrown forward into the seat in front like cabbages.

And this was considered a perfectly safe landing.

It is amazing that there has been only one accident at Tawau Airport, as far as I know. There was a fatal crash at the old airport back in the early 1990s, involving a Fokker F50 that ran out of runway when trying to land. But that wasn't a Boeing 737, so it was well within the safety margins... Tell that to the poor victims.

Nowadays, of course, these romantic, heady days of travel in the Far East are no more, and the government has sensibly built a swanky new modern airport about thirty minutes' drive outside the town. The new airport can take 737s with no heart stopping take-offs or landings. I daresay that it can take even bigger planes but I haven’t seen anything bigger than an Airbus A320 so far.

But somehow it’s not the same. The old airport now stands fallow and empty, its only users being Malaysian Air Force helicopters, and radio-controlled car enthusiasts. The old runway which was not quite long enough, or perhaps just long enough, has grown over into a grassy expanse, nothing now but a landing strip of memories.