Horse on a Plane

 

by Pa Rock

Flying Fool

This is a subject that I have written about on a couple of previous occasions.  It is a literary device, actually:  a tale of ordinary people who suddenly find themselves trapped in dangerous circumstances.

Samuel L. Jackson starred in an action movie in 2006 that was titled "Snakes on a Plane," an extremely descriptive title that told potential ticket purchasers all they really needed to know about the movie.  Either they would be up for it, or they wouldn't.  

At the time of that movie's release, I envisioned all sorts of scary sequels:  pigs on a plane, rats on a plane, unsupervised three-year-olds on a plane.  The list of horrors was limited only by one's imagination.  (Bees on a plane, anyone?)   But the idea did not seem to catch fire like I thought it would, and it was only after a full decade had passed (2016) that the next really good horror film involving public transportation was released.  That was the Korean masterpiece, "Train to Busan," about a passenger train from Seoul to the Korean coastal city of Busan.  Unfortunately for the passengers, but to the delight of many members of the audience, a freaking zombie managed to hop aboard the train just as it was leaving the station in Seoul for the nonstop trip of three or four hours to Busan.    By the time the train finally neared its destination, many of the passengers had been bitten and turned into zombies.

("Train to Busan" won many important industry accolades and did result in a sequel.  I had ridden the same train several years earlier, but had traveled on a day when the zombies all apparently had other places to be!)

I used this space in April of 2017 to tell about an incident aboard a United Airlines flight from Houston to Calgary where a scorpion dropped from an overhead bin onto the head of a Canadian business class passenger and eventually wound up stinging the poor traveler.  And then, two years after that in 2019, I also blogged about a bat that suddenly appeared and began flying about in a Spirit Airlines plane that was traveling from Charlotte to Newark.  Most of the passengers were in a state of panic, but at least one was busy filming the mayhem with his cell phone and then posting it to social media.

Comedian Stephen Colbert had this to say about the "bat" incident:   "I can't believe there was a bat on a Spirit Airlines flight.  I've only ever seen raccoons!"

Over the past week there was yet another incident involving a member of the animal kingdom misbehaving in a flying contraption.  A Boeing 747 (a damned big plane) chartered by Air Atlanta Icelandic had just taken off from JFK International Airport in New York City and was enroute to Liege, Belgium, when a horse that was being transported in the cargo hold somehow managed to break free of its transportation crate at 30,000 feet.  Workers onboard the plane were unable to regain control of the frightened animal, and the pilots had to radio JFK and request permission to return to the airport.  As a part of the process, twenty tons of fuel had to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean just west of Martha's Vineyard, the same posh island where Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had dumped fifty Venezuelan migrants just over a year earlier.

The flight to Belgium was postponed and completed on the following day.

The airlines' (and the government's) answer to all of this high-flying mayhem seems to be to cram even more humans onto every plane.  Perhaps when we each have someone sitting on our laps, the dangers of stings, bites, and getting trampled to death won't seem as real.

Happy trails!