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Hong Kong flight makes emergency landing after fire in overhead compartment

Hong Kong flight makes emergency landing after fire in overhead compartment

Yahoo21-03-2025
A Hong Kong Airlines flight made an emergency landing in China's Fuzhou after a fire broke out midair in an overhead compartment.
The fire in the overhead compartment caused panic among passengers as smoke filled the cabin.
The HX115 flight had taken off from Hangzhou, China, for Hong Kong at 12.20pm on Thursday and landed at the Fuzhou Changle international airport in Fujian province at 2.01pm.
The fire was put out by the flight attendants and none of the 168 passengers or crew members were hurt, the airline said.
The airline said it was assisting passengers and arranging another flight to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong Airlines A320 forced to divert to Fuzhou Changle International Airport after a fire broke out in the cabin. HX115 had taken off from Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport and was enroute to Hong Kong when the incident occurred.'Hong Kong Airlines flight HX115,… pic.twitter.com/ChNpzFcIyJ
— Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) March 20, 2025
Footage of the incident posted on social media showed cabin crew and some of the passengers trying to extinguish the fire by pouring water from bottles and liquid dripping onto seats.
The pilot could be heard announcing they were aware of the situation and would make a 'precautionary landing' in Fuzhou.
According to local media reports, the passengers suspected a power bank in one of the pieces of luggage in an overhead compartment caused the fire. However, the airlines didn't offer any details about the cause of the fire and Hong Kong's Civil Aviation Department said it would follow up on the incident.
Lithium batteries used in devices like laptops, mobile phones, electronic cigarettes and power banks have led to heightened concerns about their safety in recent years.
These batteries can overheat, explode or catch fire if they are damaged, overcharged or have manufacturing defects.
In early March, a Batik Air flight was filled with smoke from a burning power bank minutes before it landed in Bangkok, panicking passengers.
A nearly four-minute clip posted on TikTok showed smoke spreading and filling the cabin space while flight attendants checked overhead baggage compartments for the source.
In January, an Air Busan plane was destroyed after a portable power bank sparked a major fire. Three people sustained minor injuries in the incident at the Gimhae international airport. The South Korean airline later said it would not allow passengers to carry power banks in luggage stored in overhead cabin bins.
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US-Allied Military Planes Involved in Airspace Scare
US-Allied Military Planes Involved in Airspace Scare

Newsweek

time25-07-2025

  • Newsweek

US-Allied Military Planes Involved in Airspace Scare

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. South Korea's military has launched an investigation after one of its transport planes entered Japan's air defense identification zone (ADIZ) without prior notice, leading Japan to scramble fighters to carry out an interception. Newsweek has reached out to South Korea's defense ministry by email with a request for comment. Why It Matters An ADIZ is a designated area of airspace where foreign aircraft are required to identify themselves. Failure to do so typically prompts the claimant nation to dispatch military aircraft. Japan and South Korea—both key U.S. security partners in the Asia-Pacific—have a history of uneasy relations, shaped by Japan's colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula and a territorial dispute over a group of islets. Still, recent years have seen increased security cooperation between the uneasy partners in response to perceived threats posed by North Korea and China. A Republic of Korea Air Force C-130 takes off at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska on June 9, 2023. A Republic of Korea Air Force C-130 takes off at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska on June 9, 2023. Airman 1st Class Julia Lebens/U.S. Air Force What To Know On July 13, a South Korean Lockheed C-130 Hercules, en route to a large-scale U.S.-led military exercise in Guam, was forced to reroute to Kadena Air Base in Japan's Okinawa Prefecture to refuel. While officials did not name the exercise, it was likely the ongoing Resolute Force Pacific, billed as the largest combat exercise ever held in the Pacific. The diversion occurred after the plane burned through more fuel than expected while navigating bad weather, a South Korean military spokesperson told the media Thursday. The plane entered Japan's ADIZ without first obtaining clearance, prompting Japan to dispatch fighter jets to intercept the aircraft, the country's Joint Staff told outlet Stars and Stripes. The C-130's pilot then explained the situation to U.S. and Japanese forces via radio before making an emergency landing, Seoul said. After refueling, the aircraft was cleared to continue on to Guam, a U.S. territory. "We conveyed to South Korea that this scramble was regrettable and requested measures to prevent further incidents," a Japanese official said. "But as they are our important partner, we will continue to work closely together to address the issue." The incident came just two days after a joint drill in South Korea involving U.S. and South Korean fighter jets and a U.S. B-52 Stratofortress. It marked the first deployment this year of the nuclear-capable bomber to the Korean Peninsula. What's Next It's unclear whether South Korea's military will take disciplinary measures against the C-130 pilot. Japan is expected to continue to respond to anomalous activity within its EEZ, particularly in light of repeated encroachments by Chinese drones.

Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king
Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king

Los Angeles Times

time24-07-2025

  • Los Angeles Times

Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king

SEOUL — For many Americans, the apartment where 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives might be the stuff of nightmares. Located just outside the capital of Seoul, the building isn't very tall — just 16 stories — by South Korean standards, but the complex consists of 36 separate structures, which are nearly identical except for the building number displayed on their sides. The 2,000-plus units come in the same standardized dimensions found everywhere in the country (Lee lives in a '84C,' which has 84 square meters, or about 900 square feet, of floor space) and offer, in some ways, a ready-made life. The amenities scattered throughout the campus include a rock garden with a fake waterfall, a playground, a gym, an administration office, a senior center and a 'moms cafe.' But this, for the most part, is South Korea's middle-class dream of home ownership — its version of a house with the white picket fence. 'The bigger the apartment complex, the better the surrounding infrastructure, like public transportation, schools, hospitals, grocery stories, parks and so on,' Lee said. 'I like how easy it is to communicate with the neighbors in the complex because there's a well-run online community.' Most in the country would agree: Today, 64% of South Korean households live in such multifamily housing, the majority of them in apartments with five or more stories. Such a reality seems unimaginable in cities like Los Angeles, which has limited or prohibited the construction of dense housing in single-family zones. 'Los Angeles is often seen as an endless tableau of individual houses, each with their own yard and garden,' Max Podemski, an L.A.-based urban planner, wrote in The Times last year. 'Apartment buildings are anathema to the city's ethos.' In recent years, the price of that ethos has become increasingly apparent in the form of a severe housing shortage. In the city of Los Angeles, where nearly 75% of all residential land is zoned for stand-alone single-family homes, rents have been in a seemingly endless ascent, contributing to one of the worst homelessness crises in the country. As a remedy, the state of California has ordered the construction of more than 450,000 new housing units by 2029. The plan will almost certainly require the building of some form of apartment-style housing, but construction has lagged amid fierce resistance. Sixty years ago, South Korea stood at a similar crossroads. But the series of urban housing policies it implemented led to the primacy of the apartment, and in doing so, transformed South Korean notions of housing over the course of a single generation. The results of that program have been mixed. But in one important respect, at least, it has been successful: Seoul, which is half the size of the city of L.A., is home to a population of 9.6 million — compared with the estimated 3.3 million people who live here. For Lee, the trade-off is a worthwhile one. In an ideal world, she would have a garage for the sort of garage sales she's admired in American movies. 'But South Korea is a small country,' she said. 'It is necessary to use space as efficiently as possible.' Apartments, in her view, have spared her from the miseries of suburban housing. Restaurants and stores are close by. Easy access to public transportation means she doesn't need a car to get everywhere. 'Maybe it's because of my Korean need to have everything done quickly, but I think it'd be uncomfortable to live somewhere that doesn't have these things within reach at all times,' she said. 'I like to go out at night; I think it would be boring to have all the lights go off at 9 p.m.' *** Apartments first began appearing in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of a government response to a housing crisis in the nation's capital — a byproduct of the era's rapid industrialization and subsequent urban population boom. In the 1960s, single-family detached dwellings made up around 95% of homes in the country. But over the following decade, as rural migrants flooded Seoul in search of factory work, doubling the population from 2.4 to 5.5 million, many in this new urban working class found themselves without homes. As a result, many of them settled in shantytowns on the city's outskirts, living in makeshift sheet-metal homes. The authoritarian government at the time, led by a former army general named Park Chung-hee, declared apartments to be the solution and embarked on a building spree that would continue under subsequent administrations. Eased height restrictions and incentives for construction companies helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new apartment units every year. They were pushed by political leaders in South Korea as a high-tech modernist paradise, soon making them the most desirable form of housing for the middle and upper classes. Known as apateu, which specifically refers to a high-rise apartment building built as part of a larger complex — as distinct from lower stand-alone buildings — they symbolized Western cachet and upward social mobility. 'Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, almost every big-name celebrity at the time appeared in apartment commercials,' recalled Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist at the Academy of Korean Studies who has studied the history of South Korean apartments. 'But the biggest reason that apartments proliferated as they did was because they were done at scale, in complexes of five buildings or more.' Essential to the modern apateu are the amenities — such as on-site kindergartens or convenience stores — that allow them to function like miniature towns. This has also turned them into branded commodities and class signifiers, built by construction conglomerates like Samsung, and taking on names like 'castle' or 'palace.' (One of the first such branded apartment complexes was Trump Tower, a luxury development built in Seoul in the late 1990s by a construction firm that licensed the name of Donald Trump.) All of this has made the detached single-family home, for the most part, obsolete. In Seoul, such homes now make up just 10% of the housing stock. Among many younger South Koreans like Lee, they are associated with retirement in the countryside, or, as she puts it: for 'grilling in the garden for your grandkids.' *** This model has not been without problems. There are the usual issues that come with dense housing. In buildings with poor soundproofing, 'inter-floor noise' between units is such a universal scourge that the government runs a noise-related dispute resolution center while discouraging people from angrily confronting their neighbors, a situation that occasionally escalates into headline-making violence. Some apartment buildings have proved to be too much even for a country accustomed to unsentimentally efficient forms of housing. One 19-story, 4,635-unit complex built by a big-name apartment brand in one of the wealthiest areas of Seoul looks so oppressive that it has become a curiosity, mocked by some as a prison or chicken coop. The sheer number of apartments has prompted criticism of Seoul's skyline as sterile and ugly. South Koreans have described its uniform, rectangular columns as 'matchboxes.' And despite the aspirations attached to them, there is also a wariness about a culture where homes are built in such disposable, assembly line-like fashion. Many people here are increasingly questioning how this form of housing, with its nearly identical layouts, has shaped the disposition of contemporary South Korean society, often criticized by its own members as overly homogenized and lockstep. 'I'm concerned that apartments have made South Koreans' lifestyles too similar,' said Maing Pil-soo, an architect and urban planning professor at Seoul National University. 'And with similar lifestyles, you end up with a similar way of thinking. Much like the cityscape itself, everything becomes flattened and uniform.' Jung, the anthropologist, believes South Korea's apartment complexes, with their promise of an atomized, frictionless life, have eroded the more expansive social bonds that defined traditional society — like those that extended across entire villages — making its inhabitants more individualistic and insular. 'At the end of the day, apartments here are undoubtedly extremely convenient — that's why they became so popular,' he said. 'But part of that convenience is because they insulate you from the concerns of the wider world. Once you're inside your complex and in your home, you don't have to pay attention to your neighbors or their issues.' Still, Jung says this uniformity isn't all bad. It is what made them such easily scalable solutions to the housing crisis of decades past. It is also, in some ways, an equalizing force. 'I think apartments are partly why certain types of social inequalities you see in the U.S. are comparatively less severe in South Korea,' he said. Though many branded apartment complexes now resemble gated communities with exclusionary homeowner associations, Jung points out that on the whole, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently encouraged more social mixing between classes, a physical closeness that creates the sense that everyone is inhabiting the same broader space. Even Seoul's wealthiest neighborhoods feel, to an extent that is hard to see in many American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier often means having a nicer apartment, but an apartment all the same, existing in the same environs as those in a different price range. 'And even though we occasionally use disparaging terms like 'chicken coop' to describe them, once you actually step inside one of those apartments, they don't feel like that at all,' Jung said. 'They really are quite comfortable and nice.' *** None of this, however, has been able to stave off Seoul's own present-day housing affordability crisis. The capital has one of the most expensive apartment prices in the world on a price-per-square-meter basis, ranking fourth after Hong Kong, Zurich and Singapore, and ahead of major U.S. cities like New York or San Francisco, according to a report published last month by Deutsche Bank. One especially brutal stretch recently saw apartment prices in Seoul double in four years. Part of the reason for this is that apartments, with their standardized dimensions, have effectively become interchangeable financial commodities: An apartment in Seoul is seen as a much more surefire bet than any stock, leading to intense real estate investment and speculation that has driven up home prices. 'Buying an apartment here isn't just buying an apartment. The equivalent in the U.S. would be like buying an ideal single-family home with a garage in the U.S., except that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,' said Chae Sang-wook, an independent real estate analyst. 'In South Korea, people invest in apateu for capital gains, not cash flow from rent.' Some experts predict that, as the country enters another era of demographic upheaval, the dominance of apartments will someday be no more. If births continue to fall as dramatically as they have done in recent years, South Koreans may no longer need such dense housing. The ongoing rise of single-person households, too, may chip away at a form of housing built to hold four-person nuclear families. But Chae is skeptical that this will happen anytime soon. He points out that South Koreans don't even like to assemble their own furniture, let alone fix their own cars — all downstream effects of ubiquitous apartment living. 'For now, there is no alternative other than this,' he said. 'As a South Korean, you don't have the luxury of choosing.'

Factbox-The world's worst air crashes in recent years
Factbox-The world's worst air crashes in recent years

Yahoo

time12-06-2025

  • Yahoo

Factbox-The world's worst air crashes in recent years

LONDON (Reuters) -At least 30 people were killed when an Air India plane bound for London with 242 people on board crashed minutes after taking off from India's western city of Ahmedabad on Thursday, with the toll expected to climb, authorities said. Below are some of the fatal crashes that have occurred in recent years. 2025 UNITED STATES More than 60 people were killed when an American Airlines regional passenger jet collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on January 29 and crashed into the frigid Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. 2024 SOUTH KOREA Jeju Air international flight 7C2216 crashed at Muan International Airport on Dec. 29, 2024, killing all 175 passengers and four of the six crew in the deadliest air disaster on South Korean soil. KAZAKHSTAN Azerbaijan Airlines international flight J2-8243, an Embraer E190, crashed on December 25 after being diverted from Russia to Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev said in December the plane had been damaged by accidental shooting from the ground in Russia. Moscow has not confirmed this. JAPAN A Japan Airlines (JAL) plane collided with a smaller Coast Guard aircraft on the runway of Tokyo's Haneda airport on January 2. All 379 people aboard the JAL plane, an Airbus A350-941 flight, escaped the burning airliner. Five of six crew on the smaller aircraft were killed. 2022 CHINA A China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 crashed into a mountainous region in the southwestern Guangxi region on March 21, 2022, killing all 132 people on board, in China's deadliest aviation disaster in 28 years. 2020 IRAN Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) Boeing 737-800 on Jan. 8, 2020 shortly after it took off from Tehran Airport, killing all 176 people on board. Iran's civil aviation body blamed a misaligned radar and an error by an air defence operator. 2019 ETHIOPIA A Boeing 737-MAX 8 Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed on March 19, 2019 minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa for Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. Soon after, the Boeing 737 MAX global fleet was grounded over safety concerns. 2018 INDONESIA A Boeing 737 MAX Lion Air plane crashed into the Java Sea soon after taking off from Jakarta on October 29, 2018, killing all 189 people on board. 2014 MALAYSIA Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 departed from Amsterdam for Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, and was shot down over eastern Ukraine as fighting raged between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces. All 298 passengers on board were killed. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. The remains of the Boeing 777 and the 239 people have not been found. (Compiled by Joanna Plucinska; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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