Toncontin Airport, Honduras. Having negotiated the rough-hewn mountainous terrain, pilots must execute a dramatic 45-degree, last-minute bank to the left just minutes prior to touching down in a bowl-shaped valley on a runway just 1862 metres in length.
Barra Airport, Scotland. The airport on the tiny Outer Hebridean Island of Barra is actually a wide shallow bay onto which scheduled planes land with the roughness of landings determined by how the tide went out.
John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York. Pilots have to avoid interfering with flights into New York's two other close-by airports, LaGuardia and Newark.
Matekane Air Strip, Lesotho. The 399-metre-long runway is perched at the edge of a couloir at 2300 metres. You drop down the face of a 609-metre cliff until you start flying.
Madeira Airport, Funchal, Madeira. Wedged in by mountains and the Atlantic, Madeira Airport requires a clockwise approach for which pilots are specially trained. Pilots must first point their aircraft at the mountains and, at the last minute, bank right to the runway.
Paro Airport, Bhutan. Tucked into a tightly cropped valley and surrounded by 4900-metre-high Himalayan peaks, Bhutan's only airport is forbidding to fly into. It requires specially trained pilots to maneuver and land through a channel of tree-covered hillsides.
Reagan National Airport, Washington, DC. Located smack in the center of two overlapping air-exclusion zones, Reagan National requires pilots flying the so-called River Visual into the airport to follow the Potomac while steering clear of sensitive sites such as the Pentagon and CIA headquarters.
Gibraltar Airport. Pinched in by the Mediterranean on its eastern flank and the Bay of Algeciras on its western side, the airport's truncated runway stretches just 1828 metres and requires pinpoint precision.
Princess Juliana International Airport, St. Maarten. It regularly welcomes wide-body jetliners like Boeing 747s and Airbus A340s which fly in low over Maho Beach and skim just over the perimeter fence.Lonely Planet
