The foundation of the colony’s tourist industry and air cargo business rests on land reclaimed from Kowloon Bay and converted into an international airport. Its name and its origin go back to 1918, when two real estate promoters, Sir Kai Ho Kai and Au Tak, organized the Kai Tak Land Development Co. to create building sites by filling in the northern end of Kowloon Bay. Homesites and an 800-foot-long airstrip were in use on the land by 1924, with Fowler’s Flying School the first aviation tenant. Government took it over in 1930, improving and enlarging it in preparation for the first international flight, an Imperial Airways’ weekly service to Penang started March 24, 1936, linking with the main route between England and Australia. Four other international airlines, including Pan American and Air France, joined the formation before the Japanese seized the field in 1941. The Japanese extended its area and built two concrete runways, but its buildings were bombed into rubble before the war ended. Restored to full operations in 1947, Kai Tak handled the strangest one-way traffic boom in its history. In one month of 1949, 41,000 passengers were flown in from China to escape the advancing Communist armies. Mainland service ended a year later, and traffic declined to one-third of its former volume. The field itself, penned in by rocky peaks, had reached the limits of its development, and the largest four-engined ships were rapidly outgrowing it. For jets, it would be a cow pasture at the bottom of a canyon. The Department of Civil Aviation, after concluding that nothing further could be done to expand the existing field, began casting around for alternate sites. Fourteen of them, including Stonecutters Island and Stanley Bay, were ruled out for excessive cost, inaccessibility, or risky topography before the experts decided to put the airport right next to the old one, on a strip of land that didn’t then exist. The government put up the money and the job of building a promontory 7,800 feet long and 800 feet wide that would point directly into Kowloon Bay began in 1956. A few hills would have to be knocked down to clear the approaches, but disposal of the dirt would be simple, since 20 million cubic yards of fill were needed to build the promontory. The new airport runway was to have a length of 8,350 feet, extending the full length of the reclaimed strip and well beyond its landward end. Three thousand laborers, most of them hauling dirt by hand, worked nearly three years to lay down the man-made peninsula. Although it was near the old airport, it overcame the earlier field’s approach limitations by being pointed straight at the 1,500-foot-wide harbor entrance of Lei Yue Mun, and at the opposite end, having the Kowloon hills truncated to permit another clear shot at the runway, depending on which direction best fitted weather conditions.