Travellers' Checks | Two plane crashes in two days and their Hong Kong connection – thankfully, both belong to another era of air travel
- A Hong Kong-Vancouver flight crash-landed in Tokyo. A day later, a Hong Kong-bound flight taxied past the wreckage, took off, and itself crashed
- Plus, Manga Art Hotel, which opens in Tokyo next month, welcomes guests with collection of 5,000 manga
Hong Kong was connected to two air disasters on two consecutive days in 1966. On the afternoon of March 4, Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 402 left Kai Tak for Vancouver, via Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, where it crashed-landed in thick fog. Sixty-four of the 72 passengers and crew on board the Douglas DC-8 jet were killed.
The following day, according to Life magazine (March 18, 1966), passengers aboard BOAC Flight 911 bound for Hong Kong would have felt a “stab of apprehension” when they saw the “still-smouldering wreckage of the Canadian Pacific airliner which had crashed just 18 hours earlier”, as they taxied for take-off.
The Boeing 707 (registration G-APFE) took off and headed towards Mount Fuji. Somewhere over the sacred summit, the plane hit turbulence so severe that part of its tail detached, sending it into an uncontrollable dive. All 124 on board, including 90 Americans, were killed.
Only a month earlier, on February 4, an All Nippon Airways (ANA) Boeing 727 crashed into Tokyo Bay, killing all 133 on board. At the time, it was the worst-ever civil aviation crash involving a single plane, and its cause remains a mystery.
Although such horrors, and the planes that were involved, belong to another era of air travel, a Boeing 727 and a Boeing 707 made news in Iran this month. On January 13, Iran Aseman Airlines flew the last scheduled Boeing 727 passenger flight. The plane was 38 years old, and its landing at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport ended the 727’s almost 55 years of commercial passenger service.
