How do you make sure that you are being showered with luck? In China, people believe that throwing metal coins into the airplane engine is one way of ensuring luck. For the seventh time, in the last couple of years, a Chinese person has been arrested again for attempting to throw a handful of metal coins into the engine of the airplane!
On Monday morning, a 66-year old Woman named Wang was detained for trying to throw metal coins, a total of six of them, into the engine of a Tianjin Airlines plane right before take-off. Luckily, the coins fell down on the ground rather than into the multi-million dollar engine. The act was noted by an airport worker, and an announcement was made so that whoever did it could come forward. Wang didn’t surrender herself but was then identified using surveillance footage.
She was detained at the airport of Hohhot – the inner Mongolian capital – and then placed for a duration of ten days under the administrative detention. The other passengers were switched to another plane, and the flight to the city of Chifeng was delayed by a total of two hours.
This incident has happened a month after a man, 31 years of age, was also detained for attempting to throw coins into the engine of a Hainan Airlines plane. The justification for his action was that he was trying to make sure that he and his family had a safe flight. He ended up in jail for ten days. Back in January, two women in their twenties were also arrested in Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport for doing the same thing.
Over the years, the airlines have moved from a stance of leniency to a harsher stance on such matters. In fact, Lucky Air – a Chinese airline – sued a passenger for $20,000 for causing a delay in a flight by attempting to drop coins into the engine of the plane. Thankfully, all of the attempts by superstitious persons have failed; otherwise the results could have been disastrous. According to Ouyang Jie, a professor of the Civil Aviation University of China, a coin making its way to the engine core can cause it to cease working in midair.
A metal coin can cause damage ranging from damaging the engine’s blades to catastrophic damage by reaching the engine’s core. That is why airlines delay their flights to make sure that all of the coins that were thrown have been accounted for before resuming normal operations.