Cathay Pacific Airways, a Hong Kong-based airline, has apologized for a second time on Tuesday following an apology on Monday and suspended the work of related flight attendants, after a passenger had complained that its cabin crew kept using discriminatory words against non English-speaking passengers on board.

File photo: AFP

Netizens said it's not the first time such discrimination had been identified, and they asked Cathay Pacific to thoroughly address the problem.

"We solemnly apologize again for the passenger's experience on the fight CX987 on Sunday, which has aroused widespread public attention. We have conducted internal investigation and will release the result within three days," Cathay Pacific said on Tuesday.

The airline vowed serious punishment to any words and deeds against airline regulations or professional ethics once they were confirmed. It also promised to reflect its shortcomings to improve service quality.

The second apology followed the first one released on Monday evening when Cathay Pacific said it was deeply sorry and is taking the incident very seriously and has already contacted the passenger

On Sunday, a netizen posted his complain to Cathay Pacific on Chinese social media and e-commerce platform Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), saying she has heard cabin crew's kept grumbling in English and Cantonese against passengers who are not native speakers of the languages while taking the flight CX987 from Chengdu in Southwest China's Sichuan Province to Hong Kong on Sunday.

"If you cannot say blanket, you cannot have it," "Carpet is on the floor," are female voices heard on a sound recording released by the netizen. The netizen said she guessed the crew were laughing at passengers who tried to use the English words they know to ask for blankets from the flight attendant who can only speak English.

According to the netizen, an air hostess told her colleague "They don't understand human language" after reminding an old man via broadcast in Cantonese, who took a child to toilet just after the plane took off, to return to their seats until the safety light put off.

Another passenger has also received very impatient reply from the crew when trying to ask in English about how to fill in the arrival card, said the netizen.

"I really don't understand why these crew have no basic respect to passengers, and I hope Cathay Pacific can enhance their crew training,"? the netizen said.

Hashtags related to the discrimination, especially the sound recording of the crew's discriminatory words, had received more than 70 million views and comments as of 12 pm on Tuesday on China's Twitter-like social media platform Sina Weibo, where more netizens shared similar experience of being discriminated by Cathay Pacific cabin crew. Some said the crew wouldn't respond at all if speaking to them in Putonghua.

Netizens said that providing services in multiple languages to passengers is the practice and service standard of airline, and Cathay Pacific is obliged to provide service in Putonghua, as the flight route involved was between Chengdu and Hong Kong.

Some observers suggested passengers in the Chinese mainland only speak Putonghua when flying Cathay Pacific to help the company speed up equipping crew capable of speaking Putonghua.

"We can see from the crew's response that they could obviously understand what the passengers want but pretended not to. This is not about the crew's language ability, but a problem of their service attitude and professional ethics," one netizen commented.

Some Cathay Pacific employees behaved very poorly during the 2019 riots in Hong Kong, the airline shouldn't allow questionable values in their employees to emerge in customer service, commented another netizen.

In August 2019, China's aviation authority issued a major air safety warning to Cathay Pacific after the airline was criticized for its tacit support of anti-government riots that may expose passengers to safety threats.