Approach, landing and taxi-in at Quito airport, Ecuador. You know you’ve been in Quito too long(or just long enough) if  you start calling it by its airport code, UIO. And no one will forget that first experience, or any thereafter, landing into this lofty Andean Airport. I recall waking to turbulence and steep banks and catching glimpses of green peeks ascending starboard of our descent. If I had taken my eyes off the window and scene below, I would have seen a lot of white knuckles, but I was too entranced with the scene of my first touchdown in the UIO.

Well, I lived to tell the tale but some haven’t and some may not in the future, though the risk will eventually diminish with the new airport (open any time soon) in the valley adjacent to UIO.  Until then UIO is still one of the scariest airports in the world. I was just looking through Virgin Media’s website and came across some funny rankings I’d like to share. UIO fell between Matekane in Lesotho and Princess Julianna in St. Maartens to take the title of 4^th scariest.

Here are the excerpts from numbers 3 and 5.

 Matekane’s small 1,312ft runway is perched-perilously on the edge of a 7,550ft drop – which is where you quite literally take-off into. This is a base-jump equivalent, for the plane drops down the face of a 2,000ft cliff as soon as it leaves the tarmac. Then the plane starts flying.

Plane spotter: Don’t fear, this is just a case of simple physics and plane aeronautics. Apparently, when you take-off in Lesotho’s mountains, it’s better to take-off downwind and downhill than into wind and uphill, as those mountains are just too high to clear – which makes perfect sense to us.

 And St. Maarten

Plane spotter: Signs dot the beach warning bathers not to lie directly in the runway flight-path. But that looks pretty near impossible considering the width of the plane and the distance to the tarmac. Here’s hoping the pilots don’t get distracted by all that bare flesh.

Well, UIO seems to be in good company here. Aside from being smack dab in the middle of an Urban center complete with skyscrapers, heavy blankets of misty fog, turbulent wind tunnels and surrounded by volcanic mountains all around, according to Virgin there is a big heavy “bump” in the middle of the tarmac that pilots must contend with!  Interesting also, pilots are instructed to fly in super fast to keep aloft of all those skyscrapers in the super thin air. Not scared yet? Well, because of the often damp conditions on slippery tarmac and the super fast landings, planes have been known to slide right off the end of the strip.

Well, don’t worry too much.  I would guess there are probably 50 incident free landings every day and with the eventually-built new airport UIO will be all the more safer for your next flight in.  But for those not up for the adventure, Guayaquil has plenty of international flights and is much, much flatter .

Related posts:

• Adventure in Exhaustion–upcoming airport in Quito

Tags: Quito Airport, Quito arrival, Quito landing, worlds scariest airport