Chinese passenger opens plane’s emergency door to ‘get some fresh air’ while waiting for takeoff

It happened again. Yesterday, while a China Southern plane was awaiting takeoff, one of the passengers decided it was getting a little stuffy inside the cabin and decided to just go ahead and crack the emergency exit for a bit.

The morning flight from Chengdu to Urumqi was delayed for almost an hour, while airport staff closed the door and tried to figure out what the heck happened.

According to Chengdu Business Daily, the man explained that he thought the handle to the emergency exit door was a lever he could use to roll down the window.

For whatever reason, this is not an uncommon perception. In December 2014, a man on a Xiamen Airlines flight from Hangzhou to Chengdu yanked open the emergency exit also to get a breath of fresh air.
While this might seem insane, it’s arguably not as bad as the Chinese passenger who deployed the emergency slide of a plane in the not-an-emergency situation of wanting to get off the plane quicker after landing, resulting in 100,000 yuan in damages in that same month.
Then in January 2015, two passengers were arrested for opening three separate emergency exits on a plane awaiting takeoff at the Kunming airport and later in March, a man was detained after he mistook the emergency exit level for a handrail.
In fact, overall, there were 15 cases of Chinese passengers opening emergency exits in just the first six months of 2015, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China. To solve this scourge to the industry, domestic airline companies have been forced to team up.
[Images via NetEase]

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