South Africa, home to a recent animal-related story I reported on wherein orcas are single-handedly upending the food chain in the waters, is now home to another animal story: a penguin caused a helicopter crash.
Before you go off on some flight of fancy imagining a penguin with a gun holding a commercial airliner hostage before taking the wheel and slamming the jet into the ground when negotiators refused to pay him his ransom of 1 billion fish, there is, believe it or not, kind of a reasonable explanation for all of this. It’s extremely stupid but reasonable in an extremely stupid kind of way.
On January 19th, a helicopter doing an aerial survey over Bird Island in the Eastern Cape crashed just seconds after takeoff. An unsecured penguin riding shotgun in a cardboard box on a passenger’s lap slid off the lap of a penguin specialist and bumped into the cyclic pitch control—the stick that tells the helicopter which direction to go—and sent it veering wildly to the right. The rotor hit the ground, and the helicopter crashed onto its starboard side only about 20 meters from where it took off.
This story would not be nearly as funny if everyone and the penguin had died. Thankfully, we can all let out a hearty laugh because everyone miraculously survived. Not only that but no one was even hurt, the penguin included.
The South African Civil Aviation Authority released a report confirming that cardboard boxes are not a suitable form of penguin containment during flight. Apparently, the pilot did perform a risk assessment but forgot to factor in the risk of a flightless bird experiencing the magic of flight from the safe confines of a box on someone’s lap.
The report urges people to follow “established safety protocols” and consider the “potential hazards of cargo shifting.” They have to word it like this because if they specifically warned people to not fly a helicopter while a passenger has a penguin in a box on their lap, the writers of said report would be physically unable to prevent themselves from adding the word “fucking” and “goddamn” to every sentence.
“And please, stop fucking carrying goddamn fucking penguins in a fucking box on your goddamn fucking lap when you’re lifting off in a fucking helicopter you fucking idiot.”
The post Helicopter Crash Blamed on ‘Unsecured’ Penguin in a Box appeared first on VICE.
