Firefighters in China responded to a call regarding a burning jet engine on Thursday but sprayed foam on the wrong jet, causing a 10-hour delay in the takeoff schedule.

A Fuzhou Airlines Boeing 737-800 was parked on the Fuzhou Changle International Airport in China's Fujian province on Thursday when the pilot noticed sparks coming out of the right engine of a nearby Air China Boeing 737-8000. The pilot then notified the control tower of the incident and officials immediately deployed eight fire engines to the area, according to a Beijing Youth Daily report cited by the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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However, the pilot of the Air China plane had already shut down the engines when the firemen arrived on the scene. But the firefighters passed by that plane and instead sprayed foam on the engines of the Fuzhou Airlines jet. They reportedly saw heat emissions coming from the aircraft's engines.

Upon noticing the blunder a couple of minutes later, the control tower officials told the firemen about it, ECNS reports. The incident delayed a number of flights but the flow of aircraft resumed after 90 minutes, the report details.

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 dangerous. 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.

Meanwhile, Fuzhou Airlines announced via its Weibo account that the passengers of the affected plane were asked to disembark while they checked the aircraft. The passengers on the Air China jet, on the other hand, were given hotel accommodations after the mistake delayed the plane's takeoff.

The Chinese firemen's foam spraying of the wrong aircraft garnered mixed reactions from netizens. While some praised the fire crew for their quick response to the emergency, others suggested training them to distinguish between different airlines' logos. Other passengers joked that they were shocked to see snow in Fuzhou.

TagsAir China, airplane fire, Fuzhou Airlines