More than 20 Taiwan-bound flights have been forced to divert to Hong Kong as Severe Tropical Storm Kong-rey battered the island with fierce winds.
Hong Kong’s Airport Authority said that 24 flights destined for Taiwan had been diverted to the city as of 10.30pm on Thursday.
The powerful typhoon, which made landfall in Taitung county at 1.40pm on the same day, drove winds of up to 83 knots around Taoyuan International Airport – the highest ever recorded at the facility.
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The storm had caused 1,429 reported incidents as of 8pm, including one fatality and 73 injuries across Taiwan, according to local media.
The extreme weather also disrupted air traffic at Taoyuan Airport, with 138 incoming and 129 outbound flights cancelled due to the storm.
At least 28 flights destined for the airport were diverted to nearby ones in Hong Kong, Jeju, Okinawa, Singapore, Kaohsiung and Songshan.
The disruptions affected multiple carriers, including Singapore Airlines, China Airlines and Scoot.
The Taoyuan International Airport Authority said most of the affected flights were those connecting to Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau.
Some passengers took to social media to share their harrowing experiences.
“Due to Kong-rey, we couldn’t land. I only got a glimpse of Taiwan from the plane before being forced to divert to Hong Kong,” one traveller wrote.
Another described their own journey: “We circled seven or eight times in severe turbulence before finally landing in Hong Kong.”
A particularly dramatic account came from a passenger whose flight attempted multiple landings.
“We were originally scheduled to land at Taoyuan Airport at 5.30pm, our plane circled above Hsinchu and Taoyuan for 100 minutes, attempting to land three times without success,” the user wrote.
“The pilot initially announced we would divert to Kaohsiung, but within five minutes, declared that Kaohsiung Airport was full, so we decided to fly to Hong Kong instead.”
Hong Kong’s Fire Services Department was also placed on “local standby” - which applies when a plane approaches an airport with a known or suspected defect - after being notified at around 8pm that a China Airlines flight operating from Osaka to Taipei was forced to divert to the city.
Authorities said the incident involving flight CI153 did not result in any significant problems during the landing process.
According to flight tracking website Flightradar24, the aircraft had made several attempts to land at Taoyuan Airport before diverting to Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Observatory said that Kong-rey was located about 630km (391 miles) east-northeast of the city by 8pm on Thursday, maintaining maximum sustained winds of 140km/h (86mph) near its centre.
The typhoon is expected to turn northward through the Taiwan Strait over the next two days, moving toward the coastal areas between the mainland’s Fujian and Zhejiang provinces before transitioning into an extratropical cyclone over the East China Sea, it added.
Kong-rey is the name of a Cambodian mountain and also a girl from a Khmer legend.
More from South China Morning Post:
- Super Typhoon Kong-rey: airlines in Hong Kong cancel at least 24 flights
- Cathay Pacific diverts Hong Kong-New York flight to Tokyo after passenger falls ill
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