Oh… Canada. The Japanese will fly around with an albatross lodged in airplane's nose, but you let a cute little kitten take over the cockpit of one of your airliners and ground the plane for four hours.
It happened this morning in Halifax when a cat named Ripples burst out of his carrier and into the cockpit. A 20-minute search revealed nothing so the crew shut down the plane to "calm the cat." That's right. The cat was calling the shots.
To make matters worse the cat wiggled its way in a sensitive part of the cockpit where it could screw with and possibly disable the plane's avionics. They eventually found the cat but had to delay the flight for hours to make sure the plan was safe to fly.
The good-natured Canadians are playing this off as a bizarre inconvenience rather than the serious threat it really is. Want to stop an airliner? Just train a cat to run into the cockpit and start pulling wires. Horrifying. (Hat tip to Hoonabumper!)
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