Anyone who remembers making landings at Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport should hop on over to Simon World for little photographic burst of nostalgia. As I wrote in his comment section:

Many people think the decline of Hong Kong started with either the rise of Shanghai or the return to Chinese control in 1997. But I actually date it to the opening of the personalityless and unfortunately named Chek Lap Kok airport. Hong Kong lost its soul when it lost the Kai Tak tenement-shaker landing. For visitors, it was really the perfect introduction to Hong Kong. I was lucky enough to have window seats a few times for landings there, and you count the roaches in Kowloon kitchens on the way in. I do miss it. Of course I don't miss having to launder my underwear after every landing.

You really have to respect any landing approach that requires a big "don't crash here!" checkerboard to be placed on the side of a sheared-off hill.

In retrospect, they could have had some fun replacing that checkerboard with a bulls-eye.

Honestly, you can't buy excitement like that landing. Not even at Singapore's upcoming space port. Anything available there will be tame by comparison. In fact, I have a brilliant idea. If the operators of the space port want to offer people aeronautical excitement, they should ditch the rocket idea and simply recreate the Kai Tak landing as an attraction. Sure they'd need to build a hill (Singapore is a little light on the hills) and some tenements, but those would be a trivial engineering tasks for a country busy building an enormous network of underground tunnels and reservoirs. They could even replace the checkerboard with an enormous Tiger Beer ad, or a photograph of the Minister Mentor, or something else that is, in the words of their tourism ad campaign, "uniquely Singapore". After all, they'd need to do something to compensate for recreating a Hong Kong experience.