The practice of tossing coins into a plane’s engines to wish for a safe flight had the opposite effect for one Chinese passenger last week.
He is being sued by the aptly named Lucky Air after the flight had to be grounded overnight.
The flight from Anqing, Anhui province, to Kunming was delayed after two coins were found near the engine.
After crew members asked if anyone had thrown the coins into the engine, a passenger named Lu owned up.
He was detained for seven days by transport police and will be sued for the expense.
The airline cancelled the flight so a full examination of the engine could be carried out.
The service resumed the following day.
Lucky Air said it caused major inconvenience to the other 161 passengers and cost the company about CNY140,000 (nearly £16,000).
Ouyang Jie, a professor at the Civil Aviation University of China, told local media a single coin embedded inside the engine during a flight could possibly destroy it.
"The engine could tremble, lose speed and even stop in midair if a coin were sucked into its core."
Several other incidents of throwing coins into aircraft engines have occurred in recent years.
An 80-year-old woman chucked coins into the engine of a China Southern Airline plane at Shanghai in 2017 which caused a five-hour delay and reportedly cost CNY1 million in damage.
She was not charged due to her age.
