Hong Kong’s flagship airline, Cathay Pacific, confirmed that crew from one of its planes reported witnessing the recent missile fired by North Korea “blow up and fall apart,” the SCMP has reported.
A spokesperson told the newspaper on Sunday that crew from CX893 reported a sighting of what was suspected to be the re-entry of the missile tested by the rogue regime on Nov. 29.
The SCMP cited a message from a staff online communication platform from Cathay Pacific’s general manager of operations, Mark Hoey, which appeared to relay the message from the crew.
“Be advised, we witnessed the DPRK missile blow up and fall apart near our current location,” it read, referring to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the regime’s full title.
In the message, Hoey added that another Cathay Pacific plane, cargo flight CX096, was in fact even closer to the event, at “a few hundred miles laterally.”
The Hwasong-15 missile — the North’s most advanced missile test — was fired at 2:18am Hong Kong time last Wednesday.
According to flight-tracking service flightaware.com, CX893 was over Japan en route to Hong Kong from San Fransisco, when the missile was launched.
North Korean state media said the missile flew 950 kilometers for 53 minutes and reached an altitude of 4,475 kilometers.
Voice of America reported a representative from the US Pentagon saying the missile travelled about 1,000km before splashing down in the Sea of Japan within the country’s economic exclusion zone.
Analysts, quoted by the outlet, said that based on available data, the missile would have a range of more than 13,000 kilometers and was capable of hitting the mainland United States.
The Cathay Pacific representative said the flight was “far from the event location” but notified Japanese air traffic controllers as per normal procedure.
They said the airline was not changing any routes or operating parameters on account of the incident.
The missile test, the latest in a series of launches by the secretive regime, prompted global condemnation and further heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula, amid war of words between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US president Donald Trump, which observers fear could escalate to conflict.
