As China has developed, domestic air travel has grown and increasingly people have gained access to flying. At some point, most travelers have been first-time travelers. And there are things that seem obvious, even to domestic airlines in China, but still aren’t obvious to people flying for the first time.
A passenger on Air China flight 2754 from Quzhou to Chengdu on Thursday opened an emergency exit door on the Airbus A319 – mistaking it for the door to the toilet. The emergency slide deployed, passengers headed down the slide, and the flight was cancelled.
An Air China flight bound for Chengdu was abruptly cancelled after a passenger, mistaking an emergency exit for the lavatory, inadvertently deployed the Airbus A320 aircraft’s emergency slide at Quzhou Airport in Zhejiang province.
The incident occurred on board Air China’s… pic.twitter.com/2sHB4wOBCS
— FL360aero (@fl360aero) July 8, 2024
Since there were no more flights after this 8:45 p.m. scheduled departure, passengers were put up in hotel rooms for the night and given compensation of ~ $55 apiece.
“When the evacuation slide popped out, even the flight attendants were startled. The female passenger was in tears when she heard that she would need to pay damages,” Cheng told the Chongqing Morning Post.
The emergency door is the one you open in an emergency! And who hasn’t described the need to go to the bathroom as an emergency? We’ve seen this in China and in Pakistan before. In China we’ve seen passengers open the emergency exit to get fresh air and also throw coins into plane engines for good luck. In fact that seems to happen a lot!
Passenger on Xiamen Airlines Boeing 737-800 (MF8453) opens overwing emergency exit on the ground for "fresh air" pic.twitter.com/K7b89v9q0M
— Aviation Safety Network (ASN) (@AviationSafety) December 15, 2014
On the other hand, though, American Airlines actually says that since credit card spending now counts towards earning status, top members of the AAdvantage program are no longer likely to know how to fly. It’s not just China!
(HT: @crucker)
Flight was cancelled ? Do tell !
No ! Tell is it isn’t true that the flight was cancelled .
Did they also throw some pennies in the engine for good measure?
It is good that the passenger will have to pay for this. I wonder if the flight attendants had control of the cabin.
It’s China, doesn’t sureprise me
This is just rank idiocy. You can be a first-flyer and not know how seating assignments work, or be unclear about baggage rules, or any number of things that are not immediately intuitive. But to look at an emergency door with a window to the outside that requires a series of instructions to operate and think it’s a lavatory? Impossible.
You would think traveling passengers would be aware of the difference between Exit doors on a flight and lavatory-bathroom doors It would be very easy for travellers to tell the difference of both, unless you lived under a rock and were not an avid traveler, that be an understandable thing, but in this day and age most have travelled on planes before, so one should be well aware of this information already
Sounds like a modern version of a Ma and Pa Kettle movie.
If this had happened on American, everyone would have had to pay for their own hotel since it was the passenger’s fault the flight got cancelled…