Airline Passenger Drops Coins For Luck Near Plane Engine, Flight Delayed

A video uploaded on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website, Wednesday, showed a man throwing coins near a plane’s engine as he boarded a flight in China.

The incident reportedly took place Tuesday when Hainan Airlines Flight 7783 was about to take off from Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in Hubei province. The 31-year-old man, identified only as Xia, was seen walking up the jet bridge with his wife, who was carrying their four-month-old daughter in her arms. As the man approached the cabin door, he slowed down, reached into his pocket before dropping three coins through the narrow gap between the jet bridge and the plane.

When a security guard near the entrance saw Xia extending his right hand and making a throwing gesture, he walked up to him and asked him if he had lost something. At the same time, the guard alerted the airline staff as well as the airport police, Chinese news outlet Sina said.

Xia confessed that as per his mother-in-law’s advice, he had dropped three “blessing” coins to pray for a safe flight for his daughter, who was flying for the first time. The airport staff and crew quickly searched around the aircraft engine and three coins – two 1 yuan and one 1 jiao coins – were retrieved from the tarmac below the cabin.

The passenger was detained by Airport Public Security Bureau and later taken to the police station for inquiry. While his wife and daughter were allowed to board the flight to Urumqi, China, Xia had to spend 10 days in police custody for endangering the safety of the 101 passengers on the plane.

Due to Xia’s antics, the flight was delayed by 40 minutes.

In a similar incident Feb 17, Chinese airline Lucky Air said it was suing a passenger for throwing coins into a plane's engine, which resulted in the cancellation of the flight. The passenger in question admitted to throwing “good luck” coins into the plane after the ground staff found two 1 yuan coins near the left engine of the plane during the preflight check. “The incident caused a direct economic loss of nearly 140,000 yuan ($20,852), and our company will press charges against the passenger in accordance with the law," the airline said in a statement.

Ouyang Jie, a professor at Civil Aviation University of China, told China Daily during the February incident that tossing coins into a flight’s engine could potentially damage the aircraft. “The engine could tremble, lose speed and even stop in mid-air if a coin were sucked into its core,” he said. “That would put all the passengers on board at great risk.”

"We have seen air travelers create other safety problems in recent years, including opening emergency doors and assaulting cabin crew," he added. "It's necessary to put the wrongdoers on a black list and ban them from air travel."