A Chinese airline passenger reportedly tried to open an overwing emergency exit just before takeoff on Saturday because he was driven by curiosity to ‘see what would happen’ if he opened the exit.
The man was flying from Qingdao in Shandong Province to Harbin and was sitting at one of four overwing emergency exit rows on the Airbus A320 aircraft operated by Beijing Capital Airlines.
The overwing emergency exits are not only always ‘armed’ and ready to deploy the emergency slide if opened, but they aren’t routinely guarded by flight attendants. Instead, passengers have to be given a briefing on how to use the exits in the event of an emergency… and trusted with not opening the exit for fun or out of curiosity.
Video shared on Chinese social media shows a flight attendant reprimanding the passenger while holding the emergency exit.
“Did you open this? Why did you open it? I told you not to,” the flight attendant says to the man in Chinese.
The passenger looks anything but bothered and, at one point, seemingly ignores the crew member while he turns his attention to his mobile phone.
“I told him not to open it,” the crew member says to a colleague, who continues the interrogation: “Why did you open it? Didn’t you know it is prohibited to open this kind of thing?”
Eventually, the man admits that he had been drinking before boarding the plane. Surprisingly, the flight attendants moved the man to an alternative seat, and the flight departed without a delay.
Last week, a domestic Chinese flight from the city of Sanya in Hainan province to Beijing was delayed for more than four hours after a passenger threw coins into the engine for ‘good luck’.
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.
Chinese airlines have warned passengers against “uncivilised behaviours” that could endager aviation safety.
