Smuggling between Sai Kung and China has been going on for decades, light aircraft pilot says

_{Smuggled cigarettes are apprehended by Marine Police and Customs and Excise nearly once a week in Sai Kung waters}

Boats stuffed with smuggled cigarettes are being apprehended by the Marine Police in Sai Kung waters almost every day. It is nothing new. Smugglers have ferried stolen cars, illegal immigrants, drugs, anything that they can sell at a profit, through Sai Kung for decades. It has everything to do with our location, beyond the country park there’s Mirs Bay, then mainland China.

_{Cigarette boat with car as seen in Sai Kung waters in the 1980s}

In my light aircraft flying days back in the 80s I have flown a Cessna 172 across Mirs Bay within Hong Kong airspace above a speeding cigarette boat — so named because of the shape — carrying a stolen car. In the little aircraft I was just 500ft above the boat and I wondered if they would shoot at me. They didn’t, fortunately.

_{Papa Lima now sits forlornly on the ground at Sek Kong perhaps never to fly again}

Today, sadly, the HK Aviation Club is grounded. This has been so since the earliest days of covid. Club aircraft used to fly from the Sek Kong airfield, but since the British left the base has been under the control of the People’s Liberation Army. During the pandemic the PLA realised they could shut the amateur pilots out of the airfield and there were no repercussions. The senior PLA officers said to themselves, clearly, the amateur pilots, engineers and staff are a nuisance. Let’s shut them out permanently. The club’s officials have appealed to the PLA through the Secretary for Security to be allowed back, to no avail.

_{The original Hong Kong aviation Club at Kai Tak}

This is a sadness, as we have said, because the HK Aviation Club is more than 100 years old and is the sole institution in Hong Kong that can take a young man or woman off the street and train them to private pilot status. Now the Club is reduced to a melancholic F&B operation with aircraft models hanging on the walls and a diminishing bunch of beery old boys at the Aero Bar reminiscing about the good old days.