Among the eighteen people aboard the Kweilin that morning were three of China's most prominent bankers. Hu Bijiang, 58 years old, was Chairman of the Bank of Communications. Xu Xinliu, 49, was General Manager of the National Commercial Bank. Wang Yumei was an executive of the Central Bank of the Republic of China. All three were killed. Their deaths represented a significant blow to Chinese financial institutions at a moment when the country was under full-scale Japanese military assault.

Also killed were the co-pilot, Lieu Chung-chuan, and the steward, Wu Ching-hua. A passenger named Li Chai-sung, of the Ministry of Finance, survived; his wife, who was also aboard, did not. Among the dead were two women, a five-year-old boy, and a baby. Nine of the recovered bodies bore bullet wounds from the sustained strafing after the plane had already gone down. The American pilot, Captain Hugh Leslie Woods, survived. So did radio operator Joe Loh. Those three survival stories came out of the water; everything else was loss.

Why did Japanese fighters attack a clearly marked civilian aircraft? One theory circulated in diplomatic channels almost immediately: the real target was Sun Fo, the only son of Sun Yat-sen — the founding father of the Chinese Republic — who was believed to be on the Kweilin that morning. Sun Fo had, in fact, taken an earlier Eurasia Aviation flight that day instead.

Sun Fo later stated that a secretary had made an error and announced the wrong flight publicly. Some accounts suggested a different explanation: that Sun Fo had deliberately let the wrong flight be announced, so that Japanese intelligence would track the Kweilin while he traveled unmolested on another plane. If that second version is true, it means the passengers of the Kweilin died in part because of the political circumstances surrounding them — though the ultimate responsibility for their deaths rested entirely with the pilots who opened fire. The Japanese Foreign Office denied having shot at the aircraft at all, claiming their planes had merely chased it on suspicion of unusual behavior.

The attack was widely covered in the international press, in part because of its novelty. No civilian airliner had ever before been destroyed by military aircraft. The incident provoked diplomatic outrage, particularly in the United States, where it helped reinforce public opinion that Japan's conduct in the war against China was morally wrong.

For China National Aviation Corporation, the attack forced a practical reckoning. CNAC and other carriers began operating night flights over China, using a German-developed radio navigation system called Lorenz — a technology that allowed pilots to follow an auditory radio beacon to their destination in darkness, away from eyes that might find them. War was changing the rules of civil aviation, and the Kweilin's passengers paid the price of that transition.

The Kweilin itself was salvaged from the Pearl River. It was rebuilt, renumbered, and renamed the Chungking — reportedly because CNAC judged that keeping the name Kweilin on the aircraft would unsettle passengers who knew its history. On 29 October 1940, the Chungking was attacked again, this time by five Japanese fighters at Changyi Airfield near Zhanyi in Yunnan Province. The American pilot, Captain Walter Kent, was killed. Nine people died in that second attack.

The US Ambassador formally protested, explicitly identifying the Chungking as the same aircraft that had been shot down in 1938. The Kweilin — one plane, two names, two attacks — thus holds the distinction of being involved in both the first and the third commercial airliner shootdowns in aviation history. The bodies of the dead from August 1938 were recovered from the Pearl River Delta. The dead included two women, a five-year-old boy, and a baby. One victim had been struck by thirteen bullets.