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While helping rescue a dog in Peru our flight got delayed, so I took him to play fetch in a field by the airport.

Apparently the cargo handlers had the same idea; they let a pair of alpacas out and my dog beelined straight for them and started herding them to and partially through the terminal.

I thought I was going to be sued or shot - the handlers were good blokes and falling over themselves laughing by the time I managed to coax the whole entourage back to them.

This was a long time ago when airports were a very different kind of place.

Cargo handlers are still people, we just get away with different shenanigans now.
I could /almost/ see this still happening in Iquitos. Almost.
Sounds like my time flying through İstanbul.
I wonder if it was a service horse [1]:

> Under the regulations for Title II and III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) from the Department of Justice (DOJ), a service animal must be a dog and no other species of animal. However, there is a single exception to this rule: miniature horses.

[1] https://northeastada.org/resource/miniature-horses-as-servic...

Air travel accommodations for people with disabilities are covered under the Air Carrier Access Act, not the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under the ACAA, airlines do not have to accommodate service horses. I do believe there was a case a couple years ago, however, of an airline allowing a service horse on board.
Interesting. The only reason I know about service horses being a thing was because Southwest used to allow you to bring them [1]. Looks like it's changed since I last checked [2].

[1] https://www.afar.com/magazine/miniature-horses-are-allowed-o...

[2] https://community.southwest.com/t5/Blog/Southwest-Airlines-R...

The article specifically says the animal was in the cargo hold, so probably not.
Probably not. Flying horses is definitely a thing and there are regularly scheduled "horse buses" flying both ways across the Atlantic each week.
How else would one perform in the European dressage circuit?
Or the American one
Now I want an emotional support miniature horse. Is that so very wrong?
Guess they made the landing back at JFK from an un-"stable" approach.
They made an emergency landing at the neighboring airport
In these circumstances, it behooves them to land as quickly as possible. Must have been quite the ride for the passengers.
Neigh lad…
The article linked to a youtube video that was a "reconstruction of the incident" and I was immensely disappointed to see that it did not, in fact, dramatically reenact the chaos of a horse loose on an airplane.
I can't find it right now, but one of my pilot books had an amusing anecdote about a cargo goat that chewed through his rope.

A less amusing anecdote about weight and balance was this improperly secured MRAP, although it also involved damaged hydraulics.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/crash-of-boein...

From the American Heritage History of Flight, page 283 or so:

Another Alaskan pioneer flier, Merle K. Smith, who later became president of Cordova Airlines, recalls on of his own experiences as a bush pilot.

In the old days we used to have what is now called unusual cargo. We called it good paying freight then.

There was a homesteader who decided that he needed fresh milk. So he sent to Seattle and ordered some goats. I loaded these goats into one of the old planes and started up there. Well, I had forgotten that goats like rope, and I had tied these goats to various places in the airplane with ropes so that they wouldn't get loose and annoy me or endanger the flight.

In about twenty minutes they had all the ropes chewed through. So then I had all these goats. They'd all frolic together. There must have been eight hundred pounds of goats; and they'd all get in the back of the airplane and I couldn't hold the nose down. They would all come up and chew on me a little bit, and chew my shirt, and I'd slap them away. But I decided not to do that any more, because the first time I did that, they all went to the back of the airplane. It got to be kind of a serious situation. By the time we got to where I could land these goats they had most of the fabric eaten off the inside of the airplane, and my shirt; and the seat that I was sitting on was pretty well stripped of upholstery. But these little things happened. If you came out all right, as in this instance — well, it was funny.

This story made me laugh so hard.
Dumped 20 tonnes of fuel, nice....
Well, having the plane crash and catch on fire upon attempt at landing would have been substantially worse for the environment.
Of course it's true its better than crashing. It's just if we go up the chain of events perhaps better restraints or a checklist could have prevented this altogether. I wonder if they do post-mortems in logistics
"I wonder if aviators do post-flight debriefs." Good gravy. This is like your nontechnical relative saying "my cousin is good with computers; how hard can programming be?"
What about the cargo loaders? Unless you think the pilots loaded the horses?
Sigh . . . Donny, you're out of your element.

Once they sign for the aircraft, the pilot in command is legally responsible for all aspects of safe aircraft operation regardless of who did what work before.

If it makes you feel better, owing to kerosene being highly volatile, the conventional wisdom is that at or above 5,000 feet something like 98 percent of it will have evaporated by the time the remainder reaches earth, by which point it will have been spread out over a large area.
Pure speculation on my part, but maybe that's better for the environment because it's not being burned as it's used?
Make the airplane light for landing. Many large aircraft takeoff heavier than their max landing weight.
They burned twice that much fuel getting the plane into the air, flying an hour and a half, then having to turn back.
It'll turn into CO2 eventually. For now, it's just contributing to smog.
dumped where/how?
The horse used the elevator? I didn't know he knew how to do that.
I don't see why they need to land immediately for every little fist fight. Very abusive parent vibes. Like okay you made a little mistake, now we have to ruin the whole day because of it; i.e. "look what you made me do". Didn't anyone learn anything from the failure of zero-tolerance policies in schools?
You may find that it's particularly difficult to get police onto the plane to arrest the people who are beating the crap out of each other and take them down to the station if the plane is in the air. An in-air brawl is obviously dangerous for the participants, but also anyone nearby who might catch a leg or elbow, or for the flight crew whose job descriptions don't include physically restraining violent passengers.
A horse "getting loose" at 31,000 feet is definitely an emergency, what if one of the pilots had witnessed how loose the horse had become?? They would probably have been stunned and lost control of the aircraft immediately. Horse was also described as "in difficulty" and in need of a vet - might have pulled a muscle like Uncle Harold at the reception after a few champagne toasts.
Let me introduce you to a major terrorist incident that involved using planes as guided missiles, and then you can decide whether or not the aviation community takes in-flight violence too seriously.

This is the Hacker News version of an end user going "I don't get what's so hard about programming."

I'm not sure that tracks (although this entire thread has nothing to do with the article). I'm having difficulty coming up with a hypothetical situation involving a "fist fight" that ends in a "major terrorist incident", but only if the plane isn't turned around. I'd love to hear one.

I think the "zero tolerance" analogy may be a good one, in that it absolves people on the scene from making decisions.

If you think a qualified airline pilot in command, who in all likelihood has significant military as well as civilian aviation experience, needs to be "absolved from having to make decisions," you're just broadcasting your ignorance of the subject for the entire world to see.

"Programming isn't that hard; my little brother is good with computers, too." That's the level you're talking at here.

> a qualified airline pilot in command

I'll happily recant that statement if you're asserting that the pilot evaluates the situation, and doesn't just follow codified airline policy. "Absolves" was a bad choice of wording in any case, perhaps I should say "prevents from using their own judgment."

It sounds like you're in the industry. I'm genuinely curious, what sort of thinking goes into evaluating whether to turn the flight around after an altercation? I understand the idea of minimizing harm to passengers and flight crew, but you mentioned "using planes as guided missiles," so it sounds like the consideration is more about the plane crashing?

Did you even read the title?

A horse is loose on an airplane.

Loose cargo can be a serious issue for any aircraft, especially when 1,000 - 2,000 pounds of it is potentially panicked and independently mobile.

The end of the article mentions a fist fight.
no. no it doesn't. are you hallucinating or is some dark pattern showing us different articles?
> In July, a mid-air brawl between passengers caused one flight to make a landing 700 miles away from its intended destination.
I know it's frowned upon to ask people if they read the article but, uh, did you even read the headline?
> I know it's frowned upon to ask people if they read the article but, uh, did you even read the headline?

Uhm...the evidence suggests that he probably read more of the article than you did. :-) After talking about the horse mentioned in the headline the article goes on to mention that unscheduled landings are fairly common and gives some examples--one of which is due to a fight breaking out.