Chinese First-Time Flier Opens Plane Emergency Exit For ‘Some Fresh Air’

A Chinese first-time flier shocked flight staff and stunned passengers on a Chinese domestic flight when, as the flight prepared to takeoff, he opened the plane’s emergency exit “to get some fresh air” because the cabin was too stuffy.

According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, in a domestic Xiamen Air flight from Hangzhou airport to Chengdu in Sichuan Province on Sunday, a middle-aged Chinese man yanked open the plane emergency exit because the cabin had become too stuffy, and he wanted “to get some fresh air” after the flight had waited for several minutes in preparation for takeoff.

The flight staff rushed to pull the man away from the door and secured it. A photo posted online capturing the moment showed the man sticking his head out of the emergency exit to get a “breath of fresh air.”

The Mirror reports that the man’s action triggered the deployment of the plane’s automatic emergency slide. The website posts a YouTube video, which it claims shows the emergency slide being deployed after the man opened the emergency exit.

However, the Shanghaiist reports that the slide was not deployed because the exit was above the wings as shown below.

The Inquisitr is unable to confirm which report was accurate.

Meanwhile, inside the plane, fellow passengers reached instinctively for their camera phones and snapped photos of the incident. They posted the photos to Chinese social media sites with several comments.

One of the photos showed a middle-aged man wearing a dark-colored coat sitting and calmly leaning forward to poke his head out of the open emergency exit, apparently savoring the fresh air while a stewardess looked towards the door presumably raising an alarm.

According to NDTV, one of the passengers, Zuijia Nanpengyou, posted to social media that the man had previously told a flight attendant that he wanted to open a window.

“It’s my first time seeing a passenger open the safety door. He told the attendants he just wanted some fresh air … hope our flight won’t be delayed for too long.”

The airline said that flight attendants who spoke with the man learned he opened the emergency exist because he wanted a breath of fresh air. To avoid another occurrence, they moved him away from his seat by the exit.

And despite the unusual incident, the flight, scheduled for takeoff on December 8 at 9:15 p.m., experienced no delay. The man later disembarked at Changsha in Hunan Province.

According to a spokesperson for Xiamen Air, who spoke with the Southern Metropolis Daily, the airline did not punish the passenger because he was a first-time air traveler who had meant no harm, and his action had not caused any harm.

The airline’s decision sparked a fierce debate on Chinese social media. Many argued that the man should have been fined for endangering the lives of other passengers.

But flight attendants allowed him to stay on the plane, and according to Chinese media reports, he was not fined or punished.

“It was his first travel by air — he did not cause delay or any other direct loss to the airline.”

The Shanghaiist notes that the incident comes after another on December 14, 2013, in which a Chinese passenger on a Sichuan Airlines flight opened the plane’s emergency exit and deployed the emergency slide because he couldn’t wait to get off the plane after it landed in Beijing although there was no emergency to justify the action.

The man was detained 15 days and fined 100,000 yuan for his action.

In yet another recent incident, a Chinese woman lost her temper and threw hot noodles at a flight attendant’s face because she was not allowed to sit next to her boyfriend for the flight.

[Image: via Shanghaiist]