That was my first reaction to. But it isn't clickbait as you ware already reading the article, you could of course argue it baits you into reading on.

As I see you can split the question/answer in two, first the anthropomorphising of the plane and the events that happened. And second, something I see a lot on sites like "Hack a day", seems to me like the need to add more to the story, because the journalist otherwise cannot justify publishing it as a story. As it would only be a summary of the events already documented in the sources.