14 DAY TRIAL // Not long ago, a most bizarre incident happened at an airport in Siberia. In a nutshell, a group of passengers were left with no choice but to leave their seats and push the plane that was supposed to take them to their destination to help it achieve liftoff.
The incident was caught on camera, and a video showing the passengers doing their best to help the aircraft move forward made it online just a few hours ago. Fret not, the video in question is available below.
Planes don't like the cold either
The incident is understood to have happened at the Igarka airport in Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai in central Siberia this past Tuesday, November 25. According to local media reports, the region is currently dealing with extreme cold.
Thus, just yesterday, temperatures at the Igarka airport dropped to -52 degrees Celsius (-61.6 degrees Celsius). Hence, a Tupolev-134 airliner that spent about 24 hours stationed here froze. More precisely, the braking system of its landing gear seized up.
“In air temperatures as low as 52 degrees below zero Celsius its braking system got jammed,” Oksana Gorbunova, the current senior assistant to West Siberia’s transport prosecutor, told the press in an interview.
The plane was supposed to carry oil industry shift workers to the Yemelyanovo airport, where they were to catch another flight. Had the aircraft failed to take off, 74 passengers and 7 crew members would have remain stuck at the Igarka airport together with it.
All's well that ends well
Apparently, the oil industry shift workers were so eager to leave this remote corner of Siberia and catch their flight at the Yemelyanovo airport that, when asked to help, they agreed to get back on the ground and push the Tupolev-134 airliner.
“The tug-truck failed to get the plane moving so friendly passengers agreed to help and they soon safely left for home,” Oksana Gorbunova explained in a statement, as cited by TASS.
Luckily, the 74 passengers, together with the crew members, eventually managed to give the plane the gentle nudge it needed for its landing gear to start working properly. Once the aircraft was set in motion, they returned to their seats.
What's interesting is that, by the looks of it, some of the passengers actually found the incident quite amusing. Then again, it really isn't all that often that people are asked to push a plane to help it achieve liftoff.
Authorities in Siberia are now hard at work investigating this incident. The goal is to determine whether the plane got stuck on ice because somebody failed to properly look after it, or if maybe harsh conditions alone caused this conundrum.
