"Flight of the Thunder Dragon"

"Fire leaped from the dragon's jaws. He circled for a while high in the air above them lighting all the lake; the trees by the shores shone like copper and like blood with leaping shadows of dense black at their feet." --J.R.R. Tolkien

On July 2nd, we flew from Bangkok into Bhutan on Druk Air ("druk" is dragon in

རྫོང་ཁ་, the native language of Bhutan). We were all hoping to get to see Everest -- the flight path goes right by it -- but the skies were too cloudy. We're hoping for better luck on the way back...

The landing in Bhutan is remarkable. It is best encapsulated in this excerpt from Travel & Leisure's 2009 article "World's Scariest Runways", in which Paro was the first airport profiled:

It’s 10:45 a.m. on a cloudy day, and the crew of Druk Air flight KB205 is preparing to land at their home airport of Paro, Bhutan. Suddenly, ominous warnings start blaring, alerting them that their flight angle is all wrong and their rate of descent is far too fast. They fly a series of unconventional right-and-left banks through a narrow channel of hillsides before centering the swaying jet and putting it on the tarmac.

An emergency situation? Not quite. In fact, this is a completely normal—however nail-biting—landing at Paro Airport, set 7,300 feet above sea level. Because of the airport’s tightly cropped valley, surrounded by 16,000-foot-high serrated Himalayan peaks, this drama replays itself on every flight.

According to the article, only eight commercial pilots in the world are licensed to fly in to Paro Airport. Indeed, on our flight the pilot got on the intercom before our landing to reassure us that the upcoming maneuvers were routine, and not to be alarmed. It was incredible to fly in to an airport, while seeing cliffs out the window only a short distance away.

Kinda like flying into Linville Gorge in a 747.