One late evening two years ago, a friend of mine was flying to Beijing from a southern Chinese city.      

But upon landing, she noticed the scenery outside did not resemble what she was accustomed to seeing at Beijing airport.      

Only then did the flight attendant announce that owing to various reasons my friend could not quite understand, their flight had been diverted to Shijiazhuang, a grim, industrial city south of Beijing.

The passengers were shuffled off the plane and into the terminal, only to be locked into a lounge for several hours without any airline officials telling them what was happening.      

But the passengers struck back, breaking down the door to the lounge and storming onto the aircraft parked on the tarmac in front of them. Only after the police were called was ordered restored.      

Then there was the time passengers furious at snow-related delays smashed up check-in counters at Shanghai’s gleaming Pudong airport, a tale recounted to me with horror by a foreign lawyer friend who watched the destruction.

Or a similar situation last February, which I saw at Beijing airport, where riot police dragged away screaming passengers who had been stuck for almost 14 hours due to fog with no information from airlines as to when they might be able to leave.      

They had also tried to storm stranded aircraft in their desperation to get out.  

With millions of visitors expected to flood China in this Olympic year, the government is trying to get the nation’s airlines to treat their passengers a little better, threatening to curtail schedules of airlines with too many delays.      

 Of course, it’s not fair only to blame the airlines. Chinese passengers can behave badly too.      

The use of mobile phones is an obvious example. Banned from being used on board, mobile phone obsessed Chinese sometimes fail to heed warnings to switch off despite dire warnings from the captain about potential interference with flight systems.      

I’m not sure which scared me most — the cellphone going off minutes before touch down in the seat behind me while landing at a snowy northeastern Chinese airport, or the incessant ringing 30,000 ft above Mongolia on a flight to Europe. Neither culprit was discovered by the crew.

A common problem is passengers undoing their seatbelts, getting up and taking their bags out of the overhead lockers — all while the aircraft has just landed and is still taxiing to the terminal.      

Another is the mad dash to get on board as though an aircraft is a bus, ignoring the fact that boarding passes guarantee assigned seats for everybody.      

You just cannot help feeling sorry for the poor cabin crew sometimes.

Once on a flight from Shanghai to Beijing, a middle-aged Chinese lady disappeared into the toilet a few minutes before landing, ignoring the fasten seat belt sign.      

A sharp eyed member of crew who had noticed this jumped up and started banging on the door, screaming “Get out! Get out! Get out now! We’re landing at once!”

This continued for about a minute until the lady emerged, looking very sheepish, and went back to her seat with the eyes of the whole cabin on her.  

The wheels hit the runway a few seconds later.

Ben Blanchard is a General News and Politics Correspondent in the Beijing bureau. Picture taken at Beijing airport by David Gray.