Plane forced to turn back to JFK after horse breaks loose onboard

I could /almost/ see this still happening in Iquitos. Almost.

Sounds like my time flying through İstanbul.

Cargo handlers are still people, we just get away with different shenanigans now.

Probably not. Flying horses is definitely a thing and there are regularly scheduled "horse buses" flying both ways across the Atlantic each week.

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.

The article specifically says the animal was in the cargo hold, so probably not.

Now I want an emotional support miniature horse. Is that so very wrong?

Neigh lad…

They made an emergency landing at the neighboring airport

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.

Pure speculation on my part, but maybe that's better for the environment because it's not being burned as it's used?

Well, having the plane crash and catch on fire upon attempt at landing would have been substantially worse for the environment.

dumped where/how?

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.

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."

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.

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.

I know it's frowned upon to ask people if they read the article but, uh, did you even read the headline?

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.