Pilots are constantly on the lookout for bird strikes, but for one recent flight out of Minneapolis, the birds found their way onto the plane. Per ABC News, a pigeon was discovered on Delta Air Lines Flight 2348, bound for Madison, Wisconsin, shortly after the 119 passengers had boarded at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. "The pilot gets on and says, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we have a wildlife situation on the plane,'" passenger Tom Caw tells WCCO, via CBS News.
A baggage handler reportedly removed the pigeon, and the Airbus A220 pushed off from the gate to taxi toward its takeoff spot. That's when an update was offered to air traffic control. "Are you ready for this? There's a pigeon on the airplane and it won't go away," the pilot can be heard saying on a Broadcastify recording. It wasn't the pigeon that had just been booted, but a second pigeon, just "strutting up the aisle," Caw tells CNN. Caw captured the incident on his smartphone as passengers tried to capture it—including one man who can be seen trying to envelop the pigeon with his jacket as it flies by.
The pilot "said he had no experience with this situation," Caw wrote in his Instagram post. "The woman next to me was quite panicky" about the whole situation, he adds to WCCO. "She said to me, 'Oh, I'm going to need a free wine ... out of this." The plane returned to the gate so the same baggage handler could come and retrieve the second pigeon. No one was reported injured, and a Delta rep says the plane touched down in Madison about an hour late. In a statement, the airline apologized for the delay, adding that it "appreciates the careful actions of our people and our customers to safely remove two birds from the aircraft prior to departure." (More pigeon stories.)
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