

No, you are not experiencing déjà vu. Yup, it happened again. On Sunday, a passenger on a local flight yanked open the emergency exit of a plane as it waited for takeoff for the really good reason that the plane’s cabin was getting a bit stuffy.

The man’s action stunned his fellow passengers and the flight attendants on a Xiamen Airlines flight from Hangzhou to Chengdu, apparently they hadn’t seen anything like it before. After the flight attendants talked to the man and discovered his bizarre reasoning for opening the door, they transferred him to a seat as far away from an emergency exist as possible, according to SCMP.



Luckily, the exit was above one of the wings, so no slide was deployed, which would have been both time-consuming and costly to fix. Instead, the crew fixed the door quickly and they were ready to go without any delay. On the principle of “no harm, no foul” the airline didn’t even decide to punish the man, who reportedly was a first-time flier.

This comes right on the heels of a strikingly similar incident in which a Chinese passenger 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. Before that was the whole hot noodles and bomb threat fiasco last week that promised to result in “severe punishment” for the offenders. In comparison, this airline incident is downright whimsical, heck, it didn’t even take place in Thailand.

Anyway, we think a Xi Jinping PSA on the proper uses of an emergency exit of an airplane might be needed.

by Alex Linder

[Images via People’s Daily]

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