[5] The plane was on a routine civilian passenger flight from the British colony of Hong Kong to Wuzhou, the first stop en route to Chongqing and Chengdu in Sichuan province.

Woods took evasive maneuvers by circling into a cloud bank and was fired upon by the Japanese planes, their intentions made clear.

As the DC-2 was unarmed, Woods put it into a fast dive to find a place to make an emergency landing, but the fields were rice paddies crisscrossed with dikes.

It was speculated that Sun Fo intentionally announced his departure on the wrong plane, in effect sacrificing the Kweilin so that his real flight could travel unmolested.

[11] While the Japanese government never officially acknowledged why or if they attacked the Kweilin, they said henceforth that while they took care they would not accept responsibility for civilian aircraft flying in a war zone.

[14] A Japanese-language newspaper, The Hong Kong Nippo, admitted that although Sun Fo was the object of the attack, "our wild eagles intended to capture [him] alive.

[1] The incident was widely reported, due, in part, to its novelty as the first time a civilian airliner had ever been brought down by hostile aircraft.

"[16] After the incident, CNAC and other carriers began making night flights over China, using a new technology developed in Germany, "Lorenz", that allowed pilots to follow an auditory radio homing-beacon to the destination.

[4] On September 6 an aircraft of the Sino-German Eurasian Aviation Company was attacked near Liuzhou by Japanese fighters while flying from Hong Kong to Yunnan.

[20] On October 29, 1940, American pilot Walter "Foxie" Kent landed Chungking at the rural Changyi Airfield in Yunnan with nine passengers and three crew including himself.

[21] Unlike the unprecedented Kweilin Incident two years earlier, attacks on commercial aircraft had become more common during the course of World War II.