The December 25, 1946 issue of The China Mail contained two news items highlighting the hazards of commercial air travel. On December 23, a Pan American Airways Clipper flight carrying two dozen British “GI brides” and their children from London to the United States, to reunite with their American husbands and fathers, had been forced to turn back due to thick Atlantic fog.

That same day, bad weather had caused an Argentinian airliner heading from London to Buenos Aires, via Brazil, to hit a mountainside on its approach to Rio de Janeiro airport, killing all 21 people on board. Among the day’s local news, the American-operated China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) ran a notice wishing Hongkongers a “Merry Christmas & Happy New Year”, and inviting them to “Let C.N.A.C. take you home for Xmas”.

That evening, CNAC and its sister airline, Central Air Transport Corporation (CATC), lost three aircraft trying to reach Lunghwa Airport in a fog-shrouded Shanghai, on their way in from Chungking. The first, a twin-engine CATC Dakota carrying 11 passengers and crew, crashed while trying to land at an alternative airstrip in the northeast of the city just before 6pm. No one survived.

A few hours later, the pilots of two similar planes operated by CNAC failed to locate the runway at Lunghwa. Both crashed, killing more than 60 people, with about 15 saved. Though not well remembered today, The Hongkong Telegraph rightly called the tragic events of that Christmas evening the “greatest air disaster in China’s aviation history”.