Hainan — the Prequel

In the summer of 1954, air-crew briefing rooms at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport were abuzz with reports of construction at an air base near Sanya, a town at the southern tip of China’s Hainan island. To date, the runway had been all bitumen, a surface suited to propeller aircraft but given to melting if hit by jet exhausts. Suddenly, concrete sections appeared at each end. Pilots flying along aviation routes past Hainan could see new, jet-fighter-sized dispersal bays under construction. One Cathay Pacific Airways pilot suggested to a Hong Kong official that, in view of the apparent defense buildup, flight routes should be shifted farther from China’s coast. Nothing was done.

A couple of weeks later, Cathay Pacific had reason to regret the inaction. On July 23, one of its passenger aircraft, a DC-4 Skymaster en route from Bangkok to Hong Kong, became the centerpiece of a three-day imbroglio that U.S. Navy historians later labeled the Hainan Incident. The death toll was higher than last week’s affair: four of the DC-4’s 12 passengers and crew died. And the U.S. reaction was considerably less muted.

That morning the Cathay airliner was at 2,700 m in clear sky, some 30 km off Hainan’s east coast. At about 8:40 a.m., two Chinese fighters suddenly appeared. The aircraft were later identified as Lavochkin LA-7s, Soviet-built prop-driven fighters. For no apparent reason, the planes opened machine-gun and cannon fire. The DC-4’s captain Philip Blown tried evasive action, hurling the DC-4 into a steep dive. But the airliner kept taking hits. Syd’s Pirates: A Story of an Airline (Durnmount, 1983), by retired Cathay senior captain Charles “Chic” Eather, documents the attack. Eather, now 81 and living on Australia’s Gold Coast, recalls that despite Blown’s outstanding airmanship, there was no way to evade the Chinese attackers.

Machine-gun fire raked down the passenger aisle and into the cockpit, wrecking part of the instrument panel. Bullets tore into the back of the plane’s engineer as he tried to help the two pilots get the shuddering plane under control; he died on the spot. Another blast killed a stewardess. Barely two minutes after the attack began, Blown wrestled the burning DC-4 onto the ocean surface. Miraculously, a dinghy appeared among the debris. Nine survivors struggled aboard. As rescue planes alerted by Blown’s Mayday message began gathering, the Chinese government warned colonial Hong Kong’s British administration that no military aircraft were to approach the accident scene. The message was acknowledged but ignored. That afternoon a U.S. Navy Albatross amphibian from Clark Field in the Philippines landed beside the raft and flew the survivors to Hong Kong.

Visibly angered by the Chinese attack on an unarmed civilian airliner, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Felix Stump, told a news conference he had instructed his search mission to be quick on the trigger. Three days after the DC-4 downing, U.S. Skyraiders patrolling near Hainan shot out of the sky two LA-7s that showed signs of hostile behavior. Radio Beijing announced that two American fighters had made piratical attacks on two Polish merchant ships and one Chinese escort vessel, but failed to mention the LA-7s.

And one other Chinese puzzle: Beijing never apologized, never explained. Nevertheless, the airline sent the Chinese government a bill for 251,400. Thirteen months after the incident, Beijing paid it in full.

Anthony Paul writes the Asia Hand column for Fortune