Most if not all longhaul CX flights expected to arrive early Sunday morning are delayed to arrive after 13:50 or so. Flights are departing from Europe/America with a delay of some 8 hours.

That seems very risk-averse given the rather optimistic current forecast. But who knows.
Apologies for typo in tittle. Should be MATMO, not malto. Impossible to change now.

Thanks for the heads-up. I am returning to HKG Saturday night, so probably won't be affected. (Finger crossed &#129310


On one hand, kudos to CX for early arrangement of change waiver. On the other hand, the status update is not very timely even at the moment of writing. (No intention of contradicting Brunos)

Typically, the landing at Hong Kong Airport could get more disrupted when the typhoon is moving away from the southwest of Hong Kong. At that time, HKG will have a strong south wind, which would translate into strong crosswinds for the 07/25 runway. More importantly, the south wind will pass through the Lantau before hitting the airport, and this will create significant wind shear situations.

Strong crosswinds plus significant wind shear will bring more trouble for landing aircraft. The long-haul arrival planes carry less fuel and cannot try landing for many times, but to divert to other airports more likely. We have a thread of victims not long ago that they have to stay in the cabin for long hours after diverting to other airports due to the �weak� typhoon.

Used to be my fav airlines [CX 883]

Now back to this case, unfortunately the most affected time is in the morning of Oct 5. I think CX IOC learns something from that case to avoid more trouble of long-haul aircraft diverting to other airports.

I fully agree with you, although I am affected. Better wise than sorry.

This will have a knock-on effect on departures that day and following days as well over a dozen birds are expected with an 8h delay or so..

There are some who would say that this reflects the fact that many of CX's planes are now "flown" by people who are not actually competent to hand fly an aeroplane.

Update: Plane landed as scheduled and I have returned home safely. The bonuses were op up to J and plane parked at Gate 2, so I was out of customs in less than 10 mins. (I had no checked luggage.) Couldn't ask for a better flight.


Those people must have memory of gold fish.....

Terrifying moment Boeing 747 wing smashes into runway while landing during typhoon in Taiwan (Aug 2025)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...on-Taiwan.html

They are definitely playing it safe here, which is a good thing.
The one thing that puzzles me is that they wouldn�t rebook passengers with connections via different routings but rather �collect� them all at HKG. Anybody an idea why they are doing it?

It appears that CX was over-cautious. Other airlines (including CX regional flights) landed normally.

Quite some regional flights that were planned with longhaul equipment have been adjusted to regional aircraft because the aircraft are all arriving late in HKG. The CX739/734 SIN rotation, which is one of the few Singapore flights that still operates with A359 got swapped to B-HYG. Not a pleasant surprise for those involved.

Hong Kong airport warns of more than 100 disrupted flights due to Typhoon Matmo

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/...lly-moves-away

�The Airport Authority said on Sunday that as of 8.30am it anticipated 27 flight cancellations and 81 delays caused by the typhoon.�

One benefit of all the scheduled long-delay for CX longhaul flights arriving in the busy early morning time, is that there was no landing wait for the other flights and most arrived early. It also means that the 4pm onward landing is very busy with many CX longhaul flights landing being added to the usual schedule.

i've always been very curious how various airlines deal with typhoons in HK. One would think everything operates normally even with T3, but clearly this is not the case. And we have also learnt over the years that in many instances flights do take off and land normally even with T8.

So what is the science behind the decision to delay/cancel flights with typhoons ?

Preemptive strike against worst case scenario

Many businesses was prepared for T8 hoisting overnight.

Indeed T3 is no problem and there are T8s and T8s.
CX did not reschedule its regional flights (incl. India) that were to land in the morning. They had time to wait for a more precise weather forecast.
The problem was the 15 or so longhaul flights that are typically in the air for 10 hours.
They had to make a decision well ahead of the flights departure time (so over 24h before landing). At the time there was a slight risk that Malto might change path towards HK and become a super typhoon.
WIth the recent incident and HK being very sensitive to media reports, CX decided to reschedule creating some chaos for connecting pax and future longhaul departures. Several hours before Malto hit, its path became clear, but it was too late to change back the longhauls departure time.