Air China plane forced to land after man threatens attendant with pen

A Beijing-bound Air China flight was forced to make a sudden landing in Zhengzhou city in central China on Sunday, April 15, after one of its passengers threatened a flight attendant with a fountain pen, China's civil aviation authorities (Civil Aviation Administration of China) said, Xinhua news agency reported.

The civil aviation body said in a brief statement on its website that the passenger aboard Air China Flight 1350 tried to use the pen to hold the attendant "under duress". The man was not identified, it said.

Nobody was harmed in the incident, the brief statement added.

The flight started from Changsha, the capital of South China's Hunan province at 8.40 am and was scheduled to reach Beijing around 11 am, said local reports.

But the less than two-and-half-hour journey turned longer as it made an unusual landing at Zhengzhou in Henan province in just over an hour of flight, as per a post made on Air China's official Weibo microblog, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter.

Air China said the plane made the unscheduled landing because of "public safety reasons" and that the police and civil aviation authorities were handling the case.

Authorities at Zhengzhou airport said it immediately activated emergency measures and that the airport was operational.