The Poet Who Flew Into Fog: Xu Zhimo's Fatal Jinan Flight

Aviation Survival Stories · Jul 22, 2026 · 17m

The Poet Who Flew Into Fog: Xu Zhimo's Fatal Jinan Flight

Fog hid a railway and a poet’s last minutes: Xu Zhimo, one of China’s most celebrated poets, boarded a mail plane without a ticket and died when the Stinson Detroiter Jinan flew into a mountain on November 19, 1931-why did a mail plane with a free passenger fly straight into a mountain in broad daylight?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events that led to the crash, from Xu’s Cambridge-influenced fame and his decision to rearrange plans to hear Lin Huiyin speak, to the flight crew’s choices in thick Shandong fog; what drove Xu…