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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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