A domestic Chinese flight from the city of Sanya in Hainan province to Beijing was delayed for more than four hours on Wednesday after a passenger reportedly threw coins into the engine.
Despite the obvious danger, the act of throwing coins into an aircraft engine is meant to bring luck, and this is by no means the first time that less well-travelled Chinese passengers have unintentionally delayed a flight with this method.
China Southern flight 8805 was due to depart Sanya at around 10 am on Wednesday, but after the coin-throwing incident, the flight had to be delayed so that engineers could carry out an inspection of the engine and make sure it wasn’t damaged.
In the end, the one-year-old Airbus A350-900 was only cleared to fly more than four hours after the original scheduled departure time.
A flight attendant was captured reprimanding the suspect on a video shared by Chinese state media. The man told the flight attendant that he had thrown between three and five coins into the engine.
Rather than bringing good luck, the suspect was detained by airport police and China Southern issued a statement on its Weibo account warning passengers not to take part in “uncivilized behaviors”.
The statement cautioned passengers that offenders faced punishment as throwing coins into the engine posed a threat to aviation safety.
Engineers were able to locate the coins and allowed the aircraft to depart after determining that damaged had been done to the engine.
