An Indian airliner with 140 passengers on board crashed into a stray buffalo seconds before takeoff from the western city of Surat in Gujarat on Thursday evening, the plane's operator, SpiceJet, said on Friday. Although none of the crew members or passengers were reported to be hurt, the Boeing 737 aircraft suffered multi-million dollar "substantial damages."
The buffalo, which had apparently strolled onto the runway through a gap in the airport's boundary wall and was "essentially invisible" against a dark background, was killed immediately upon collision, eventually forcing the airline to ground, Reuters reported.
"Stray animals are a growing menace in some airports," SpiceJet said in a statement, adding that the Surat airport was located near fields where grazing cattle are a common sight.
"This incident has affected our regular operations and hence SpiceJet flights from Surat will now be suspended after this incident," airline spokesperson Siddharth Kumar said.
On Thursday, the flight was about to take off for Delhi at around 7 p.m. when the pilot reportedly spotted the animal "all of a sudden," but was unable to stop the plane from fatally colliding into the buffalo, according to NDTV.
"If the plane had taken off after this, we would have crashed. Thank God we were saved," said a passenger, Prabhakar Joshi, who talked about a loud noise just as the plane started picking up speed, as if "something had hit the wheel."
Following the incident, passengers on the Delhi-bound aircraft were transferred on to another plane, with SpiceJet stating that they would not resume flights at Surat without "corrective measures to ensure its passengers, crew and aircraft are not put at risk again."
While separate inquiries have been ordered by the Director General of Civil Aviation and the Airports Authority of India into the incident, sources claim that a two-hour meeting with Minister Ashok Gajapati Raju resulted in the decision that fencing at all airports, which pose the danger of animals straying onto runways, should be replaced by concrete walls.
Meanwhile, the problem of animals straying onto runways have long been an issue at India's airports.
"In 2008, a Kingfisher Airlines plane hit a stray dog on the runway at the Bangalore International Airport. The same year, an Air India aircraft hit a Nilgai at Kanpur Airport. In 2009, a Kingfisher flight hit a stray pig at Nagpur airport," according to NDTV.
