Jetliner’s Slide Off Hong Kong Runway May Revive Debate on Safety at Busy Airport

It was 11:39 a.m. on a stormy Thursday when Jon Capetz glanced out his office window overlooking the runway of the Hong Kong airport and saw a landing jumbo jet slide into the harbor.

“It looked as if the plane overshot the runway, skidded and landed in the sea,” said Capetz, a business development manager at Digital Equipment Hong Kong Ltd. “The plane stayed afloat a short distance from the runway, and then the emergency chutes popped out.”

Twenty-three people were injured.

A severe tropical storm was lashing the British colony as the China Airlines Boeing 747 arrived from Taipei with 296 people aboard and touched down at Kai Tak International Airport.

A spokesman for the Taiwanese airline said the pilot applied the brakes and reversed engine thrust but could not stop the plane on the wet runway. He turned the aircraft left near the end of the runway to try to stop it, and the 747 slid into the harbor tail first.

The spokesman said pilot error did not appear to have been the cause of the accident.

Life rafts and firefighters transported passengers from the emergency chutes to the runway, which juts into Hong Kong harbor.

“Rescue boats quickly arrived at the scene of the accident and helped people escape from the plane,” Capetz said.

Hong Kong government officials said the 23 injured were rushed to the hospital but only two were admitted. They were listed in fair condition.

Thursday’s accident will probably revive longtime criticism of safety at Hong Kong’s airport, now the world’s fourth-busiest, and re-emphasize the need for a new one, now being built. The China Airlines jet was the fifth aircraft to crash into the waters around Kai Tak. It was the most serious incident since a Chinese airliner ran off the runway in 1988, killing seven.

Kai Tak, which is approaching its capacity of 24 million passengers a year, is due to be replaced by a new multibillion-dollar airport on the outlying island of Chek Lap Kok in 1997, the year Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty. But the completion date is in doubt because China fears it will be left with huge debts for the airport and related projects after 1997.

Kai Tak, which began as a primitive grass airstrip in 1925, was extended during World War II by Japanese occupation forces. After the war, the British government built the single runway on landfill that extends into the harbor.

The one runway is sandwiched between the harbor and a honeycomb city, making it notoriously difficult to approach. As planes descend over the colony, they thread their way between two lines of mountains and low over the rooftops of the built-up Kowloon Peninsula, affording passengers a grandstand view of local life.

Last week, an inquiry team reported that in the past decade, takeoffs and landings at Kai Tak have increased to 131,000 a year from 54,300, or 141%. In response, the airport’s landing patterns were changed for safety reasons.