Kai Tak's Runway 13 approach was considered one of the most demanding in commercial aviation. Aircraft had to thread between the Kowloon hills, pass close enough to a painted checkerboard on a hillside to use it as a visual reference, then turn hard right and lose altitude fast over densely populated neighborhoods before touching down on a runway that extended into Kowloon Bay on a reclaimed promontory. In heavy rain, with visibility at 450 metres, the margin for error was extremely thin. The accident investigation concluded that the final approach became unstable, and that windshear may have been a contributory factor. Then the visual references that pilots needed to judge their altitude and alignment were suddenly distorted by heavy rain. The right wing of the Trident clipped approach lights on Runway 31. The main landing gear tyres struck the runway promontory — that narrow elevated strip of reclaimed land — with enough force to rip the right main gear completely away from the wing.

The aircraft, stripped of its right gear and momentarily airborne again from the impact, came down a second time about 600 metres further along. It veered right, crossing the grassed strip beside the runway diagonally. Then the nose gear and left main gear collapsed. The Trident slid across the parallel taxiway and into Kowloon Bay. In the seconds that followed, the cockpit separated from the rest of the fuselage. The main cabin, where most of the 89 occupants were seated, remained largely intact. The flight crew were not. Divers entered the water immediately and tried to reach the separated cockpit. They could not get through in time. The autopsies determined that the flight crew members in the cockpit had been injured in the crash — but the cause of their deaths was drowning. They were alive when the aircraft entered the water.

Of the 89 people aboard Flight 301, seven died. Six of the dead were crew members, trapped in the cockpit that sank into Kowloon Bay. The seventh was a Hong Kong passenger who survived the crash itself but succumbed to his injuries in hospital afterward. He was one of seven Hong Kong passengers who were injured. Three crew members who were positioned further back in the aircraft survived with injuries. Among the passengers — who included Americans, Taiwanese travelers, a French national, and a Chinese-American — fifteen sustained injuries, two of them Americans. The report's framing that "the accident was survivable" was not hollow: for 82 of the 89 people on board, it was. But survivability depends on where you were sitting. The six crew members whose professional duty placed them at the front of the aircraft had no chance.

The official accident report, produced by Hong Kong's Civil Aviation Department Accidents Investigation Division, was direct about the contributing factors and the failures that made the outcome worse than it had to be. Windshear was a possible factor in the unstable approach. The flight deck crew were not wearing shoulder harnesses — a safety measure that could have reduced their injuries in the impact. A sixth crew member in the flight compartment was sitting on an unsecured metal stool. There were no passenger safety leaflets aboard the aircraft. One cabin attendant had not fastened her seat belt for landing. And critically: despite the fact that the approach and departure paths at Kai Tak were substantially over water, the aircraft carried no passenger lifejackets. For the passengers who ended up in Kowloon Bay, that last absence mattered enormously. The accident happened on the same calendar date as Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 in Texas, though in Hong Kong it was already August 31st when the crash occurred, while Dallas was still in the late hours of August 30th.