Plans for an airport at St Helena had been mooted since the 1940s but the island's terrain made the the plan 'feasible but not practical' at the time. It was not until 2005, when the UK government announced plans to build an airport here, that the idea looked like becoming a reality. It opened, to a lot of negative publicity, in 2016.
There are a few myths surrounding the runway: no, it wasn’t built facing the wrong way; and yes, it's direction was adjusted by two or three degrees to avoid a possible site of a rare form of wolf spider. The difficulty is the shear winds created by the nearby cliffs and peaks and these occur at the north end of the runway, the landing end and the end that didn’t move despite the adjustment to alignment. The reality is that there is literally nowhere else on this island where a runway could be built without some massive terraforming project, the likes of which you only find in science fiction novels. Even this site required the filling of a three hundred foot deep ravine to create a flat area big enough to take the runway.
Because of the shear winds the airport falls into a category where two full captains must be in the cockpit, no pilot and junior copilot here. They first fly the aircraft from Johannesburg to a small airport in Namibia where it is fully refuelled before making the five hour hop across the Atlantic to St Helena. Normally, after three failed attempts at landing the pilots return to Africa. The record however is five attempts. When I arrived they landed first time although it was disconcerting looking out of the window to see what appeared to be our aircraft flying directly towards a cliff. My only concern now is that this Saturday the aircraft gets in and I don’t miss my flight home to London.
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