Flight delayed after firemen spray wrong plane with foam

This is the type of story that makes me nervous to fly.

An Air China plane, left, waits for fire extinguisher at an airport in Fuzhou, East China’s Fujian province, Dec 10, 2015.

However, when the firemen arrived four minutes later, the Air China jet had already shut down its engines – so the men blazed straight past that plane and zeroed in on the Fuzhou Airlines plane, after spotting heat emissions coming from its engines.

The whole situation started when the pilot of a Fuzhou Airlines plane contacted the control tower.

In the wake of the firemen’s mistake, Air China released a statement saying sparks coming out of a plane’s engine are “normal” and are not considered unsafe.

A plane was delayed for 10 hours after fire crews attempting to extinguish sparks from an engine covered the wrong aircraft in foam.

According to an Air China statement, the sparks from its plane stopped when the engine in question was powered down. While the company said sparks are produced by some aircraft fuel when the engine runs at low pressure, it did not explain why they had shut down the engines, the report relays. But there was just one problem – when they arrived, they sprayed foam on the wrong plane.

Six flights were diverted to other airports, while around 24 flights were delayed from taking off, reported Shanghai Daily.

Firefighters were quickly alerted to the error by airport officials. Unfortunately, that plane, along with all the others at the airport, was grounded for the next 90 minutes by all the fire suppression foam on the runway. As for the firefighters themselves, the spokesman suggested they work on their counting skills.