Animal Sightings

Guest Editor Joel Chusid

Airplanes and wild animals don’t mix well, no matter what size. From the tiny critter side, airline travelers flying out of Kansas City Airport one Saturday a few weeks ago can attribute spiders to their tardy departures. Three employees in the Olathe, Kansas air traffic center were bitten by baby spiders which spewed forth from a hatched nest; causing a brief evacuation of the area to a safer part of the building.  While the delays were minimal, passengers were three hours late on US Airways Express flight 2690 from Charlotte to Indianapolis last July when bees swarmed a tug that was needed to push the airplane away from the gate. A beekeeper had to be called to remove the little buzzers. A slightly larger animal sighting took place on American Airlines when fellow crew members claimed to have seen a flight attendant feeding a rat in flight.  They report she had the animal, supposedly a pet, hidden in her underwear. The story is bizarre, indeed, and there are no photos, but the flight attendant felt harassed by the airline and it’s gone to court. Lion Air flight 892, a Boeing 737-900 flying from Ujung Padang to Garontalo, Indonesia with 117 people encountered a much larger animal, three of them in fact. The landing plane struck one of the cows after it touched down, causing it to skid off the runway. Luckily there were no serious injuries, but the airplane, well, it’s sort of equivalent to your car running into a deer on the highway. Not pretty.

Hard Times in Venice

About 140 people got to spend the night on the floor in Venice’s Marco Polo Airport after the cabin crew on their British Airways flight to London Gatwick “ran out of time”. Such incidents can happen when a flight is delayed, in this case a mechanical reason which delayed the inbound flight, and the crew has duty time limits that cannot be exceeded for safety reasons.  What was unusual here is that the pilots did not exceed their time, so they were able to fly the airplane back to Gatwick empty. The passengers were locked up in the terminal without their baggage or food for the night as the airline claimed there were no available hotel rooms in Venice, although comments from online readers dispute that. If it was any consolation, the cabin crew was also relegated to the floor.

Captains Going Above and Beyond

On a brighter note, two recent stories surfaced that show that airline captains really do more than just fly the plane.  On Easyjet flight 8365 from London Gatwick to Bari, Italy, the captain had to negotiate with passengers to get four of them to give up their seats as the plane was too heavy for takeoff.  Now, this is not that unusual, although it is the ground crew’s responsibility to solicit volunteers. From my own experience, there are usually willing volunteers and in this case, it was a €400 compensation payment per volunteer plus a hotel. The flight endured a fifty minute delay, but once the captain threatened to remove the last four people who checked in, four volunteers came forth. But it was the captain on an El Al flight departing from Tel Aviv for New York who wins the compassion award this time.  On August 8, 36 excited children, including 11-year old Inbar Chomsky, boarded the flight headed for summer camp, having checked in and gone through all the formalities including medical exams. This was no ordinary summer camp, but a non-profit special program designed for children with cancer and other hematologic illnesses.  After the children were seated, an adult collected passports, which is not unusual for a group of minors traveling internationally, but the young girl’s passport was missing. A frantic search of the aircraft ensued, and with passengers getting restless and annoyed, the girl was told she would have to deplane and her mother would have to come pick her up and take her home. The devastated child got off, and the plane taxied to the runway for takeoff.  Suddenly her passport was discovered in another child’s backpack. The crew was alerted, but it’s extremely rare for planes, let alone one assigned to an international route, to return to the gate after departure. The captain altered and negotiated with the control tower, airline and ground crew for thirty minutes, and finally it was allowed to return to the gate to pick up the distressed child. This is one time where compassion trumped schedule.

Sorry, No Change

On most flights nowadays, flight attendants can only accept debit or credit cards for food or duty free purchases.  Irish low cost carrier Ryanair apparently still accepts cash.  The ultra-low cost carrier recently took some flak in the media recently when a training document was made public that instructed cabin crews to avoid giving passengers change from their purchases. The document encouraged flight attendants to “boost passenger spending” by saying they had no change and suggesting customers buy something else from the cart, including scratch cards. When the news hit, Ryanair claimed the training document had been subsequently amended, and that it was an instruction that had been developed by a third party. Ryanair has a reputation for squeezing out ancillary revenue in a variety of creative ways, with one of the most recent announcements being it would offer advertising space on the nose, winglet and fuselage of its 303 airplanes to companies for a fraction of the cost of a newspaper ad.