Of interest to aviation fans, there is a brief snippet of the landing sequence from the 1955 film The Night my Number Came Up on Youtube. The clip shows some rather barren Kowloon hills on the approach to runway 13.
Born into a working-class family in Warrington, Northern England, John Hansbury grew up in grinding poverty among the steel mills of Lancashire (now Cheshire). He had a gift for mathematics, and was able to take advantage of scholarships to get the education necessary to become a draftsman. As a youth he discovered the joys of the outdoors, and became a skilled mountaineer as a young man. As he worked in a protected occupation he could not be conscripted when WW2 started, so in late 1941 he volunteered with the RAF and became a navigator in Beaufighters over India, Burma, and Nepal.
