The World's Most Unusual Airports

The World's Most Unusual Airports 1- Princess Juliana International Airport, St. Maarten Be sure to wave at the beachgoers as you land here: The St. Maarten airport is located just beyond this beautiful Caribbean Islands Maho Beach, and youll skim right over their heads before you touch down.

2 - Kansai International Airport, Japan What do you do when you dont have enough land to build an airport? Create some of your own. Japans Kansai International Airport rests on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, which passengers reach by car, rail or ferry.

3 - Gisborne Airport, New Zealand Gisborne Airport, on New Zealands North Island, may be the only airport in the world where planes occasionally have to stop and wait for trains to pass.

4 - Barra Airport, Scotland The island of Barra in Scotlands Outer Hebrides is the only place in the world that uses a beach as a runway for regularly scheduled flights.

5 - Hong Kong International Airport Care to hit the links before you fly? A nine-hole golf course is just steps away from Hong Kong International Airports Terminal 2, complete with floodlights for nighttime golfing.

6 - Courchevel International Airport, France Nestled high in the French Alps, the resort town of Courchevel ranks among the worlds most sophisticated ski areas and comes complete with its own airport.

7 - Juneau International Airport, Alaska Theres very little flat land to be found around Juneau, the capital of Alaska. The mountains surrounding Juneaus airport, plus the frequent bad weather, make flying here so dicey that Alaska Airlines pioneered new flight technology to make it viable on a modern scale.

8 - Gibraltar Airport In tiny Gibraltar, space is at a premium enough so that the airports runway intersects Gibraltars main road, which has to be closed every time a plane takes off or lands .

9 - Telluride Regional Airport, Colorado At an elevation of more than 9,000 feet, Telluride Regional Airport is the highest commercial airport on the continent. Its also surrounded by mountains and built on a cliff.

10 - Copalis State Airport, Washington If youre landing at Copalis State Airport on Washingtons Pacific coast, you could be forgiven for wondering where the airport is. In fact, its little more than a strip of beach, which also happens to be open to beachgoers.

11 - Toncontn International Airport, Honduras Toncontn International Airports 7,096-foot-long runway is one of the shortest international runways on the planet. The nearby mountains make it dangerous it can be hard for planes, especially large ones, to get up enough speed to clear the peaks from such a short runway.

12 - Denver International Airport Denver International Airport is big at 53 square miles, its the largest in North America but it walks softly on the Earth.