Coronavirus Crisis: South Korea Flight Barred From Landing In Vietnam After Takeoff

About 40 unhappy passengers onboard an Airbus A330-300 disembarked at Seoul on Saturday. The reason for their disappointment was that they had just left South Korea headed to Hanoi in Vietnam. After 20 minutes into the flight, the airline was informed that South Korean carriers were banned from landing at the Vietnamese airport forcing the flight to land elsewhere.

The flight, Asiana Airlines flight OZ729, departed at 10:10 a.m. presumably on-time and got the notice at 10:30 a.m. Vietnam offered an alternate landing at Van Don International airport at Quảng Ninh Province, a 210 km drive away from Hanoi, but because Asiana does not normally fly to Van Don, a decision was made to return to South Korea.

According to Flightradar 24, a Swedish internet-based flight tracking service, the A330-300 was approaching Shanghai at the maximum altitude of 38,000 feet at the time of the turnaround.

Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, was told by a spokesperson for Asiana, “While Vietnam has not provided us with a clear reason (for the last-minute ban), we believe it is connected with the spread of the new coronavirus."

Other flights with Vietnamese carriers like Vietnam Airlines and VietJet with Seoul to Hanoi flights could land in Hanoi indicating some exceptions were made for those flights that were not granted to South Korean carriers, especially the low-cost carriers (LLCs).

The latest updates about the COVID-19 virus illuminates the concerns about South Korea. A tracking map from Johns Hopkins, titled Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by Johns Hopkins CSSE, shows that while China remains by far the leader in confirmed cases, South Korea has a firm hold at second place with over 4,000 confirmed cases and ranks 4th with 22 deaths behind China, Iran, and Italy. Daegu and nearby county of Cheongdo, in the southern area of the country, is where the outbreak is concentrated.

The full scale of the losses to Vietnamese tourist industries will not be known until the COVID-19 epidemic subsides but Vietnam is an increasingly popular destination for South Koreans, who have been lured by inexpensive resorts closer to Vietnam than traditional tourist destinations further away in other Southeast Asian countries.

An example is Vietnam’s central coastal city of Da Nang. Before the coronavirus, there were upwards of 20 daily flights between South Korea and Da Nang. In the first nine months of 2019 South Korean visitors to Vietnam increased by 23%.

Vietnam has reported only 16 confirmed cases of coronavirus, so ordering a jet to return to its point of origin in mid-flight may be an effective containment tactic. But when an Airbus A330-300, which seats more than 250, flies with only 40 passengers, that is all the evidence needed to show that these are unusual times.