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A Chinese airline warned passengers not to throw coins into plane engines after an Airbus A350 was delayed for 4 hours

https://www.businessinsider.com/passenger-threw-coins-into-engine-delayed-flight-4-hours-2024-3

China Southern Airlines posted a five-minute video on Weibo warning passengers against actions like "throwing coins at the plane."

A Chinese airline warned passengers not to throw coins into plane engines after an Airbus A350 was delayed for 4 hours

China Southern Airlines warned passengers on social media not to throw coins at planes.
A Wednesday flight was delayed four hours after such an incident.
In a video, a flight attendant tells confused passengers someone threw "three to five coins" into the engine.

63 comments

ccunning

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3-5 Coins? Are they fucking nuts?!

Everyone knows 8 is the luckiest number.

3-5 averages to 4 which is extremely unlucky

*smdh*

nutsack

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You have a suspiciously strong grasp of Chinese culture

bobs_monkey

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Marsupial

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Auspiciously even.

AbouBenAdhem

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But 3 + 5 = 8.

Is addition an unluckier operation than averaging?

casmael

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Clearly - addition has 8 letters

faintwhenfree

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But the original comment says, 3-5 that's clearly negative 2.

Learn to count people /s

Ragnarok314159

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Removing the metal objects from the plane would cause issues. Boeing has been testing this for a while.

dysprosium

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Why in the shitfuck would anyone feel the urge to throw coins at a fking plane? Ashame this was not highlighted in the summary

GBU_28

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Superstitious dumbfucks. Same energy as buying rhino horn for erectile dysfunction

Fiivemacs

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Wait, rhino horn doesn't work?

ThePantser

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No you need human horn for that.

avidamoeba

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That's circular reasoning.

Contingencyfork

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No you need something pointed.

4am

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This is tubesteak erasure

Silentiea

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You're thinking of the lower horn.

assassinatedbyCIA

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You have to scratch the right part of the prostate with it. That's where most people get it wrong.

Aceticon

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Of course it works!

Horn makes you horny and big horn make you big horny!

It's only logical /s

acockworkorange

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Only rhino milk. Coincidentally the key ingredient in printer ink - hence the absurd prices.

StaticFalconar

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Not saying they aren't superstitious, but i have never heard of the act of throwing coins into a jet engine as part of any superstition.

T156

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It's not that they're specifically throwing coins at the engine, but that the superstition is to chuck some coins at a thing to try and get some luck on your side. Like a mix of wishing well and good luck charm.

The engine is probably because it's accessible, and they're unlikely to miss when hitting it. You also just don't hear stories from people who do chuck a coin at the wing, or into the cabin, because it doesn't cause any problems, so doesn't make news.

UnderpantsWeevil

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Duh. Everyone knows the cure for erectile dysfunction is lottery tickets

floofloof

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This isn't the first time a passenger has thrown coins into a plane's engine.

CNN reported that it happened on another Chinese Southern Airlines flight in 2017, when an elderly passenger said it was "a prayer for a safe flight."

Every time you think you know how dumb people can be, they find a new way to surprise you.

RamblingPanda

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1000015721

dysprosium

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I might ask a dumb question as well... But how does a passenger even accomplish that? From inside the plane? Just before boarding? On a high tower throwing coins downward on a low flying plane? Wutttt

stoly

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Not all airports use a bridge. Many use stairs to get up. That lets you get right next to the engine.

dysprosium

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Yeah I figured. Still at a loss for words

stoly

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Especially since it already happened relatively recently.

Aceticon

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Having had a dirt poor illiterate farmer grandmother, I can totally see how some people with the best of intentions might make presumptions about things which sound really stupid for most people.

I mean, at some point when I was a kid and she was staying with us, my grandmother got really confused when she saw the same actor in multiple soap operas because she thought soap operas were real and we had to explain to her the concept of theatre acting.

Ultimatelly it boils down to that person having or not the kind of personality which recognizes their own ignorance on a subject and refrains from acting on such presumptions, and clearly in this case somebody ignorantly presumed it would be a good thing and went ahead and did it.

ChicoSuave

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It's for luck. Like throwing coins into a well or on train tracks. No one said it was a good idea. But it makes some folks feel more calm about their journey, despite wrecking havoc on a turbofan.

AbidanYre

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Oh, it'll bring luck alright. Probably not the kind they want though.

Aceticon

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"May this trip be swift and leave me firmly back on the ground"

* throws some coins into the plane engine *

KnightontheSun

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We did coins on the tracks to flatten them for fun!

stoly

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I’ve been on planes with groups of people who obviously have never flown before and were getting up and walking around during take off. This does not surprise me at all.

homesweethomeMrL

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Hicks are everywhere.

hangukdise

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Also note China modernized faster than any country. China went from farming-based to post-industrial in about 30 years and population behaviours and beliefs didn't follow it at same speed. So they have more hicks with ability to damage stuff than most of Africa and Central Asia

T156

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Particularly in some areas where you might have a community whose most technological device was a tractor a few short years ago, a bunch of developers show up, throw money at them, and they've basically time-travelled into the future when they decide to use that money to go on a trip.

catloaf

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How did they even have access to do this? The only time I've boarded a plane without a jetway in decades was at a smallish airport (Warsaw) that had scheduling issues and we had to get bused out to a "gate" that was just a parking spot out on the apron.

ViXY_DBC

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Luci

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I've gotten on planes at Toronto from the tarmac multiple times. It just depends.

macrocephalic

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Airports charge money to use the Skybridge. If you travel with cheap airlines then you'll often go to gates without bridges. It's actually amazing the things that airports charge for.

Usernamealreadyinuse

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I know there are a lot of smaller airports which use a bus system

SkaveRat

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even bigger ones

WarmSoda

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Have you ever boarded a plane in China?

catloaf

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No but I looked up the flight, and the airport it used in Hainan (SYX) has a number of gates with jetways, which are generally preferred for use. It's not a podunk airfield in rural China.

WarmSoda

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Thanks for the info. That's crazy. They were smart enough to get a clean line to the engine, and so incredibly stupid they threw coins into it.

Tangent5280

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The seal team six of stupid

Pips

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But they still probably use buses on occasion. Also, it's not exactly hard for a passenger to step through the little doors to the stairs at the end of the jetway, chuck a coin, then continue boarding.

catloaf

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Those doors are alarmed (at least in the US).

Pips

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They're also frequently propped open worldwide to handle gate checked bags.

ABCDE

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That's.. Most of the flights I've taken.

catloaf

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Really? Which airports do you usually use?

ABCDE

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I don't really have ones I regularly use, but in the past few years: CPH, CNX, BKK, DMK, PNH, TFS, INI, BEG, AGP, MAN.

Aceticon

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In Lisbon to board some of the planes a bus that takes you to where the plane is and then you climb up some stairs.

In London Luton you walk from the building to the plane and climb some stairs to board.

In my experience, even in Europe it will happen in low cost airports (such as Luton) or those which have too much traffic for their actual boarding facilities (the one in Lisbon which is almost in the center of the city and has by now been planned to be replaced for 4 decades, all the while tourist number have exploded to something like 10 million per year, so even with the expansion that was possible to do, there are simply not enough jetways for all flights).

Also in general little provincial, small city, "airports" (I used quotes because some amount to little more than airfields) almost never have jetways though at times are served by passenger jet planes (typically the kind of mid-size ones made by the likes of Embraer).

wjrii

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Did you throw a coin in the engine at Warsaw?!?!? I think you've had good luck. It's not uncommon, probably because there are a lot of smallish airports with chronic scheduling issues. It's even more common to disembark that way, though the "good luck prayer" excuse holds even less weight in that scenario, LOL.

catloaf

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No, but those were prop aircraft, Dash 8s I think. The intake is a much smaller target.

KnightontheSun

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[deleted]

Pretzilla

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Great. Now to make it hard and virile they'll need to go back to throwing rhino horn, shark fins, and snakes on the plane.

MrFunnyMoustache

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You've turned it into a Concord.

homesweethomeMrL

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Eyyy hey hey . . . how you doin?

AlexisFR

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Weird, why would people from an enlightened new age modern country do this?

don

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The age might be enlightened and the country might be modern, but people will always find a way to be stupid.

Pretzilla

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It's just a variation on magical thinking

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

A major Chinese airline has warned passengers not to throw coins into its planes' engines after an incident last week.

China Southern Airlines posted a five-minute video on Weibo explaining how actions like "throwing coins at the plane" can delay flights and threaten safety.

"If they pose a threat to aviation safety, they will also face varying degrees of penalties," it said in a post on the social network.

On Wednesday, March 6, the airline's domestic flight from the southern region of Hainan to the capital, Beijing, was delayed by four hours, data from Flightradar24 shows.

According to the Liberty Times, a video posted online shows a flight attendant saying that a passenger threw "three to five coins" into the Airbus A350's engine.

In 2019, Chinese airline Lucky Air sued a passenger for $21,000 for throwing two coins into a plane's engine, which he said was for good luck, per Simple Flying.

The original article contains 261 words, the summary contains 152 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

RampantParanoia2365

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The easy fix for this is clearly just adding a Y to the end of 'Luck' airlines.