The governor continued by saying that traditionally the lanterns had only been released over the Yipeng and Loy Krathong festivals. He added that as the lanterns drifting across the night sky had become a tourism draw in its own right, they were now released on more or less any occasion.
Mr Prasatbandit finished off by saying the lanterns now disrupted flights to and from Chiang Mai Airport as well as started blazes when they landed and their fires were still burning. Critics of the mass release of the lanterns at the annual Loy Krathong Festival and on New Year’s Eve also say they are an accident in the making.
This was borne out over the New Year. Staff at Chiang Mai Airport found the remains of 206 lanterns inside the facility’s perimeter fence on 1 January. Engineers conducting a pre-flight inspection of a Bangkok Airways’ Airbus A320 found a lantern had been sucked into one of the aircraft’s jet engines.
Chiang Mai to limit celebratory sky lanterns
News in Asia
Officials in Chiang Mai are meeting later this week to hammer out regulations restricting the release of sky lanterns on celebratory occasions. The governor of the northern Thai province, Suriya Prasatbandit, said local agencies needed to work out a plan which would ban the launch of the lanterns at certain times and in strategic locations.