Horse-Forced Landing Throws Plane Off-Course

Imagine being the owner of the horse that made an entire plane turn around mid-air.

You read that headline right. Apparently, a Boeing 747 flying from New York to Belgium was forced to return to JFK after a horse on board “escaped from its stall.”

A horse is loaded into an Air France horse transport pod

The plane was around 31,000 feet in the air when the pilot contacted Boston air traffic control. “We have [a] live animal, [a] horse on board the airplane,” the pilot told them. “And the horse managed to escape the stall.”

"The horse managed to escape the stall."

The pilot said that they didn’t have any problems flying, but that the plane needed to return to New York because the crew couldn’t re-secure the horse.

race horses in rows of 3 being readied to load into a cargo plane

“We don’t have a problem…flying-wise,” the pilot told air traffic control, “but we need to return, return back to New York. We cannot get the horse back secured.”

A screenshot of the YouTube video that is a reconstruction of the pilot / air traffic control communications. an icon of an airplane is projected on a map south of Massachusetts

Side note: According to CNN, apparently even horses travel in either first class, business class, or economy when flying. I need to know more about this particular horse and how it was traveling. Maybe she just wanted some of the honeycrisp apples they were giving out in first?

A pinto pony is tempted by an apple, set on a fencepost on a bright sunny day

Apparently, less than 30 minutes into the flight, the plane pulled an abrupt U-turn somewhere near Boston. What’s more, they notified Boston air traffic control that due to their weight, they would need to dump 20 tons of fuel. They ended up dumping the fuel around 10 miles west of Martha’s Vineyard.

A Boeing 747-800 prepares taxies onto the runway

I looked it up, and according to Reuters, jet fuel prices for Northwest Europe “were at $878 per metric ton” as of November 2. So, that’s a little over $17,500 of fuel.

An airplane is filled with fuel on the tarmac

The pilot did request that a veterinarian be present at the plane’s landing in New York, but there’s no indication that the horse was injured. Currently the airline, Air Atlanta Icelandic, has not responded to a BuzzFeed request for comment.

a horse in a sterile room with multiple vets

There were some pretty punny tweets about the situation:

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