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If horses were meant for flight, they would have wings.
But our persistence in put equines in the air led to a hilarious situation recently when a plane was forced to make an emergency landing at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport after a horse found its way into the cargo hold of a Boeing 747.
The incident occurred on Jan. 9 with the horse loaded on an Air Atlanta Icelandic flight bound for Liege, Belgium.
The horse, however, had other ideas. As horses often do.
According to flight audio and a report from Business Inside, the “Boeing 747 climbed to about 31,000 feet when a pilot called air traffic control to say that a horse had escaped from its stall and that they needed to return to JFK.”
“We are a cargo plane with a live animal, a horse, on board the airplane. And the horse managed to escape his stall,” one of the plane’s pilots says in the video posed above.
“We don’t have a problem as of flying wise but we need to return back to New York. We cannot get the horse back secured,” he continued.
But that wasn’t in all.
In order to make a safe landing back at JFK, the plane needed to dump thousands of gallons of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean.
“Due to our weight we need to dump 20 tonnes of fuel,” a pilot told air traffic control.
How exactly the horse escaped is unclear. But it remained loose until the plane landed at JFK. The crew had requested a vet be on standby as the animal was “in difficulty,” per the audio recording.
As it turns out, horses aren’t big on the whole air plane thing. Who knew?
Though no one seemed to tell the woman who once brought her emotional support horse with her into first class. Probably a smart choice. It’s way too big for economy.