The 'world’s most dangerous airport’ is so terrifying only 50 pilots are qualified to land
William Morgan
Featured Image Credit: EyesWideOpen/Getty Images
There's one airport in the world that is objectively the most difficult and dangerous airport for a pilot to land a plane safely, with only around 50 people on Earth even allowed to try.
That is, Bhutan's Paro International Airport (PBH), its only travel hub for foreign visitors, which appears to have been designed by someone with no idea what an airplane is, or how they land.
Nestled deep in the Himalayan mountain range with 18,000ft peaks on all sides that suddenly drop 11,000ft to reveal the airport's short runway, Paro has more than earned its reputation for difficulty.
Hell, the flight is considered to be so nail-biting that only a plane's captain is allowed to attempt the approach, with first mates and other co-pilots effectively barred from trying it without thousands of hours of experience and time in a simulator.
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Passengers flying into Paro Interational Airport get a terrifying view as they land (EyesWideOpen/Getty Images)
Part of the reason that only 50 or so pilots are allowed to attempt the approach is that it requires a number of short turns around mountain valleys and a terrifyingly low pass over nearby homes, before you can even see the runway.
Pilots are required to have completed at least 1500 hours of normal flying and have gained a further 500 hours of specialist mountain flying experience before attempting to land at Paro.
They can't even try it by themselves until a senior captain has observed them landing at Paro a minimum of 30 times, and that's after dozens of real and simulated flights where they haven't even touched the real controls.
This is because mountain ranges test a pilot's ability to maintain safe clearance levels as well as their situational awareness, with weather conditions and crosswinds often changing quickly and with no warning.
And that's without considering the extremely tricky environment that pilots have to navigate in the minutes before their approach at Paro, which has led all flights outside of daylight hours to be banned, with short notice closures during the windy season.
The above video shows the terrifying perspective of a cargo transport plane attempting to land at Paro Airport in 2021.
But while cockpit videos of pilots approaching the runway, after doing a sharp turn and a close pass over some mountaintop homes, are enough to make you feel queasy, surprisingly, it is actually an incredibly safe airport.
There has never been a single fatal crash at Paro International Airport, in part due to the rigorous standards applied to all pilots who want to land there. Captain Chimi Dorji has explained why to CNN Travel.
He said that Paro is 'difficult, but not dangerous'. "It is challenging on the skill of the pilot, but it's not dangerous, because if it were dangerous, I wouldn't be flying," he shared.
A skilled pilot with thousands of hours and the extremely specific training required to land here could probably do so safely every time. Captain Dorji said: “In Paro, you really need to have the local skills and local knowledge area competence.
"We call it area competence training or area training or route training from flying from anywhere into Paro.”
If you're wondering why they didn't simply build an airport somewhere other than a valley thousands of feet above sea level, it's actually because Bhutan is the most mountainous country on Earth, with 97 percent of its landmass covered by mountains.