If any of you are like me in the sense that you’re both a) mildly terrified of flying, and b) not helping that in the slightest by being sadistically addicted to ‘Air Crash Investigations,’ you’ll already be fully aware that planes and birds are not good m8s. At all.
They’re the reason why Captain Sully has wound up being played by Tom Hanks in a dramatic (if not apparently shitty) film about US Airways Flight 1549 and its aftermath, and they’re the reason for a bit of a situation out of Sydney Airport earlier today as well.
Though not quite as dramatic as the ‘Miracle on the Hudson,’ United Airways flight UA840 did run into trouble shortly after taking off from Sydney when crew apparently noticed the plane had suffered bird strike damage.
The Los Angeles-bound flight departed Sydney at 9:45am this morning, but at around 10:30am the plane made the decision to turn around and divert back to Sydney.
The Boeing 777 aircraft had apparently copped minor damage to an engine after a bird was sucked into it, and the vessel spent a solid few minutes circling out to see as the pilots dumped fuel from the craft.
That fuel dump was captured by people on board, including this video from Instagram user Kip Hale.
Flight paths monitored by FlightTracker confirmed the plane flew holding patterns before successfully returning to Sydney Airport at around 11:30am.
United UA840 Syd-LA now landed back safely back in Sydney after declaring emergency following a reported bird strike pic.twitter.com/9Yxcoxx0Pk
— Shannon Carr (@ShannonCarr_10) July 4, 2016
Fire crews met the plane as it landed, and at last report emergency services remain on the scene.
All 308 passengers on board the plane were successfully disembarked.
The Australian biopic of the incident, presumably starring someone like Grant Bowler as the gruff but well-meaning pilot, is probably coming soon.
Source: Herald Sun.
Photo: Christopher “Kip” Hale/Instagram.
