Word: hainan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...flyer called into the radio, as the pilots shut down the most damaged engine, and the plane bucked and shuddered in indignation. There was no chance of making it 2,100 km back to Okinawa or even to the Philippines. The closest airstrip was on the resort island of Hainan, known in Chinese legend as the "end of the world," where the sky and sea meet to form a perfect haven. It is also home to many Chinese military bases, the kind of place where honeymooners sit on the beach and watch the submarines surface offshore, the fighter jets buzz...
...Bush was at Camp David that Saturday night with a group that included National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice when he got word of the incident. Twenty-four American servicemen and -women were being held at the Lingshui air base on Hainan...
...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...
...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...