Just ‘plane’ pushy! Sometimes in life you just need a little push. While most air passengers have their complaints, they’re usually about delays, or bad service, horrible food, etc, etc. But typically most passengers’ complaints are rather trivial compared to this story, and usually they don’t revolve around having to actually get out of an airplane to help get it moving! Such is the case in deepest, darkest, coldest Russia.

Passengers in Igarka, a small town in the far north of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region (yeah, we had to Google it too and it’s somewhere way up north in Siberia) learned that their plane had become stuck to the ground as temperatures plunged to a somewhat more than chilly, minus 52C!

A video making its rounds on the Internet then shows them pushing the wings to get the plane moving. The aircraft in question: A Tupolev 134 operated by Katekavia, a subsidiary of Utair, one of Russia’s biggest airlines.

 

The plane, which was reportedly carrying 74 passengers, eventually did take off and landed safely in the regional centre of Krasnoyarsk. A spokesperson for Katekavia denied the plane had become stuck and said it was instead the vehicle meant to push the plane that had stopped working.

According to Russia’s Prosecutor General Office in charge of transport, the frozen landing gear meant the plane could not be towed to the landing strip. “Due to the low air temperatures, the chassis’ brake system froze and a tow truck was unable to move the plane onto the taxiway to carry out the flight,” prosecutors confirmed in a statement.

“The passengers on board got out of the plane and started pushing it onto the taxiway. The technical director of Krasnoyarsk-based Katekavia, Vladimir Artemenko, acknowledged the incident took place to Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily.

“That morning it was minus 52 Celcius. The plane had stood on the runway for 24 hours and the pilots forgot to take off the parking brake. That caused the brake pads to freeze up,” he said. However, a few hours later, Artemenko told the Interfax news agency that there was no problem with the plane, and that passengers only helped pushing it because the tow truck started slipping on the ice.

The airport’s director, however, suggested that the passengers had decided to push the plane for a joke, the AFP reports. “Most likely, the plane’s passengers, oil workers, decided to do a kind of ‘selfie’. It was a good joke and it became a big thing on the Internet,” said Maxim Aksyonov.

Prosecutors warned that the stunt could have been dangerous. “They were pushing the plane as if it was a car that lost traction, which you categorically should not do due to the danger of damaging the skin of the fuselage,” said Oksana Gorbunova, an aide to transport prosecutors.

Whatever the case, it does make a nice image and will make us think twice about whingeing next time we get served only one glass of wine!

 

Supermarket fails!