Monday 5 October 2009

Jonanjima seaside park

Yesterday we went to Hiro's favourite park in Tokyo - Jonanjima Seaside Park. It's an unusual park in that it's all on reclaimed land - even the beach there is reclaimed land!  Much of Tokyo Bay though is reclaimed land.  Jonanjima is located straight across from Haneda, the fifth busiest airport in the world, which makes it a great place for a plane spotter. At about 3pm or so I was timing how long between each plane that passed over. I only timed for three consecutive take-offs but for those three, the time between each was only 1min 20 seconds. Busy!
Jonanjima Kaihin Park  

Looking across the beach to Haneda

Shellfish gathering is popular and there are signs saying collection is for personal use only.


Looking across Tokyo Bay to port unloading facilities

As I was checking the stats for the world's busiest airports, I was quite surprised US airports dominate airport rankings for passenger numbers and flight movements but for international passenger movements the highest ranked US airport was JFK at no. 19. This put the busiest US International airport behind cities like Istanbul, Taipei, Dubai, Seoul, Madrid, Dublin.
The top 10 in case you are interested.
1. London Heathrow Airport London 61,345,518
2. Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport Paris 55,804,279
3. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Amsterdam 47,349,319
4. Hong Kong International Airport Hong Kong 47,201,000
5. Frankfurt Airport Frankfurt 46,707,577
6. Dubai International Airport Dubai 36,592,307
7. Singapore Changi Airport Singapore 36,288,050
8. Narita International Airport Tokyo 32,343,590
9. London Gatwick Airport London 30,433,810
10. Barajas Airport Madrid 30,135,120

(Haneda is mostly domestic flights so doesn't make this list.  The lists of passenger / flight movts. are overwhelmingly in the US, which is unlikely to be interesting unless you have an interest in US domestic airports.)