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Cape Town - Shooting a celebratory water canon over a plane is a long-standing aviation tradition, usually done to honour a pilot retiring, or, as in this case, the inauguration of a new aircraft route.
Sir Richard Branson, entrepreneur behind the highly successful Virgin group, has become famous for using this sort of flamboyant gesture within the Virgin Atlantic enterprise.
The latest of these supposedly flamboyant spectacles, however, was rather ironically dampened when a botched water canon sprayed thick foam, and not water, over the aircraft celebrated!
NEWS Inaugural Virgin Atlantic flight cancelled due to foam canon salute instead of water
http://t.co/RFhryY14Yl pic.twitter.com/8pdkKBggpG
— AirLive.net (@airlivenet) March 30, 2015The Virgin Atlantic plane – with its ‘Beauty Queen’ name emblazoned on the fuselage of the Airbus A330-300 - had just landed in Manchester with 188 passengers on board after its high-profile inaugural flight from Atlanta, Georgia in the USA, reports Daily Mail.
Upon preparing to depart from Manchester as return flight VS109 again, the 'water' canons, as per tradition and planning, fired away foam rather than H2O.
The festive mood was extinguished as passengers was delayed for five hours until the foam could be cleaned from the aircraft's highly sensitive propellers and turbine blades.
Virgin Atlantic's first service from MAN-ATL got a water cannon salute but was mistakenly sprayed with foam, so was delayed to remove it!
— Ross Hallam (@MrRossHallam) March 30, 2015@VirginAtlantic apparently we're delayed because foam was sprayed on our plane instead of water!! Publicity stunt backfired!
— Helen Palmer (@helenbryony) March 30, 2015252 departing passengers who hoped for an on-time inaugural flight departure at 10:35, instead had to wait five hours before finally being told the flight would have to be cancelled altogether!
Well done to the prick who sprayed virgin's first flight from Manchester to Atlanta with foam rather than a water salute delaying us 24hrs ??
— Beth Harper (@bharperx) March 30, 2015Love it when we're delayed because the celebrations for virgin atlantics first flight from Atlanta to manchester gets out of hand
— Beth Harper (@bharperx) March 30, 2015Love it even more when they keep delaying us by 30 minutes every effing 30 minutes. Proper helpful
— Beth Harper (@bharperx) March 30, 2015Virgin Atlantic apologised for the incident on Twitter, saying it was a "foam-pas".
The passengers were lodged in overnight hotels and told to report for a replacement flight at 09:30 on Tuesday, 31 March.
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