Four Chinese female passengers detained for hair-pulling fight during flight
Women, aged 30 to 50, will be held in custody for five days for endangering the safety of an aircraft after dispute over seating led them to pull one another’s hair on Shenzhen-bound flight
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 15 April, 2015, 10:30am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 15 April, 2015, 2:39pm
Stephen Chen
[email protected]
A photograph taken by a passenger shows the women allegedly fighting one another during the flight. Photo: SCMP Pictures
Four Chinese women were detained for being involved in a hair-pulling fight aboard a domestic flight – the latest in a series of cases of badly behaving mainland travellers.
The women began arguing mid-flight over the adjustment of seats on a Shenzhen-bound plane from Dalian city in Liaoning province, witnesses told Shanghai news website Thepaper.cn.
Then the heated dispute escalated into a full-blown physical confrontation, with the women getting up from their seats and tearing at each other’s hair.
The fighting passengers, aged between 30 to 50 and all from Liaoning, were detained by police when the plane landed for a stopover in Nantong city, Jiangsu province.
They will be held in custody for five days for endangering the safety of an aircraft, Nantong police confirmed.
Thepaper.cn reported that police were notified about the altercation by the aircraft’s crew before the plane landed.
Shenzhen Airlines Flight ZH9724 landed safely at its destination.
Incidents like these involving Chinese passengers – both on domestic and international flights – have made headlines in recent months for either breaches to airline rules or misbehaviour.
In December, state media branded a group of mainland airline passengers “barbarians” after they scalded a Thai stewardess with hot water and noodles, and threatened to blow up the plane during a flight from Bangkok to Nanjing.
Days later that same month, a brawl between four women from mainland China on a Hong Kong-bound flight over a noisy baby almost forced the plane to return to Chongqing.
Last month, a mainland Chinese couple were kicked off a Dragonair flight to Beijing after the wife cleaned excrement from her one-year-old son over a sink inside a cabin toilet without closing the door, prompting other passengers to complain.
On February 24, a mainland couple and their three-year-old son were ejected from a Hong Kong-bound Cathay Pacific flight from Bangkok after the toddler’s refusal to put on his seatbelt sparked off a heated argument on the plane.
A day before that, on February 23, there was a similar incident on another flight returning to Hong Kong from Bali, Indonesia, after a mainland Chinese boy, aged three, refused to remain in his seat. His grandparent insisted on carrying him.
Chinese authorities have said they will rank the different levels of bad behaviour of “uncivilised” mainland tourists so the travel industry can share data and choose whether or not to do business with them, state media said.
