Monday, November 01, 2010

Insert Reptile Here on a Plane

I have been on the road for the last couple of weeks and ISP issues kept me mostly without e-mail, so I haven't caught up on comments yet. I'm amused that you're all way better at telling stories than you are at voting on your favourites, so it looks like I'll have to pick a winner myself, probably tomorrow.

For tonight, the first pass through my e-mailbox gives me a much forwarded story about a crocodile bringing down an airplane. It seems that on August 25th of this year a Let-410 turboprop (that's the same type as in the famous lions-under-the-wing photo) was en route from Kinshasa to Bandundu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shortly before landing the aircraft crashed, with no prior reports of difficulty. The single human survivor, a passenger, said that passengers had stampeded to the front of the aircraft to escape a crocodile that escaped from a passenger's luggage.

Initial analyses were skeptical about the crocodile, but later ones confirm this was the testimony at the hearing.

The best comment I've found on the subject is from David Learmount on his blog Learmount, when he says,

"The painfully obvious solution to prevent further accidents like it is to prevent passengers bringing crocodiles - or other dangerous animals - on board. But in the DR Congo, which has had the worst aviation accident record in the world for two decades, this sort of event is, unfortunately, just 'part of life's rich tapestry'."

I'm not guaranteeing a blog entry tomorrow: I've run out of already-written buffered entries and don't have a lot of time, but I have a lot of story notes and will try to transfer them to the blog so you have something to read while I'm away. Meanwhile, if anyone out there speaks Khmer, can you teach me some basics?

2 comments:

Aviatrix said...

Yay, I'm caught up on comments. And there's leftover Hallowe'en candy.

coreydotcom said...

sweet. you learn something new everyday on this blog. like khmer is the language spoken in cambodia. thought it would have been something like: cambodian.

thanks.