It was a night-mare at 30,0000 feet.
A flight was forced to return to its airport of origin in New York after a horse got loose in the cargo hold and started to run amok. The incident was reconstructed in a video uploaded to the channel You Can See The ATC.
According to the clip, the circus in the sky occurred on an Air Atlanta Icelandic flight that was flying from JFK airport to Liege Belgium on the afternoon of November 9.
The Boeing 747 had ascended to 31,000 feet over Boston when of all a sudden a horse broke free from its container.
Audio footage captured the pilot’s reaction to Mr. Ed’s high-altitude escape.
“We are a cargo plane with a live animal, a horse, on board,” the flyboys could be heard exclaiming over the intercom to the control tower. “The horse has broken out of its stall.”
And while flying wasn’t an issue, they said they needed to return to New York as soon as possible as they couldn’t “resecure the horse” mid-flight.
To return to base, the pilots had to dump 20 tons of fuel to avoid losing horsepower, travel blog A View From The Wing snickered.
Upon arrival, the flyboys requested the aid of a veterinarian as their horse was “in difficulty,” although they didn’t specify the nature of the problem.
Thankfully, the flight was able to take off at 6:35 p.m. local time and arrive successfully in Liege local time at around 6:49 am on November 10.
As of yet, the details surrounding Seabiscuit’s in-flight jailbreak are unclear, although this isn’t the first time a plane has had to divert due to an unusual circumstance.
In September, a Delta flight from Atlanta to Barcelona was forced to turn around and make an emergency landing after a passenger “had diarrhea all the way through the plane.”
Many diversions have been caused by unruly passengers.
In July, an American Airlines flight from New York City to Guyana was returned to JFK Airport after a disruption in which a passenger called a crew member a “waiter.”