A Delta aircraft headed from Narita Airport in Chiba Prefecture, Japan was forced to make an emergency landing at the airport today, China’s Xinhua news agency reported, according to officials there.

The Boeing 757, on its way to Saipan, the second-largest of the Northern Mariana Islands after Guam and a popular tourist hotspot, was reportedly forced to return to Narita and make the emergency landing after smoke was detected in the plane’s cabin.

Officials from the airport said the incident occurred just before 11am, but confirmed that while emergency services stood by, none of the passengers or the plane’s crew members were injured.

The emergency landing came the same day as the airport’s website was reported as possibly being hacked by airport officials today.

They confirmed that since yesterday evening they had noticed an unusually heavy amount of traffic on the site which “caused disruptions”, but while affecting its entire website, said the possible attack did not affect flights.

The airport’s website was similarly attacked in October when the site was down for around eight hours.

Japan’s public broadcaster NHK said that a Twitter user claiming to be a member of the ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous posted a message about the group being responsible for the site.

Narita airport is the main international airport in Japan, and handles about half of the nation’s international passenger traffic and 60 percent of its international air cargo.

Meanwhile Chubu Airport, located on on artificial island in Ise Bay, Tokoname City, Aichi Prefecture, 35km south of Nagoya in central Japan, was also attacked in October last year.

Similar attacks by the group using a method known as ‘distributed denial-of-service’, or DDoS in short, which sees servers flooded with more traffic than they can handle crash, also occurred around the same time last year involving the health ministry’s website and the website of the Organising Committee of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

- Bernama