A flock of seagulls gathered on the runway at Venice Airport on Friday morning, causing quite a commotion, CNN reports.
Seagulls are known for their antics: they steal food, break dishes, snatch snacks from the hands of passersby, and happily bite the fingers of those who get in their way. But this time the feathered “criminals” went further, causing an hour-long cessation of air traffic and two hours of chaos at the city airport.
Venice Marco Polo Airport, north of the city and with a runway next to the lagoon, is the fifth busiest airport in Italy and the largest in the north of the country outside Milan.
“Flights were suspended from 9:54 to 10:45, as confirmed by an airport spokesman. Twenty incoming flights were diverted to other airports in northern Italy: Treviso, Verona, Trieste and Milan,” the department wrote.
And while Treviso is just 30 minutes away by bus, those diverted to Trieste and Milan faced a long journey of two or three hours to Venice.
The Venice airport has its falcon, which was sent to the runway to scatter more than two hundred birds. “Fauna-friendly acoustic aids” were also used, the airport said. Once the falcon had done its job and the seagulls had flown away, the airport was back to normal operations by 11:20.
By the way, flocks of birds near airports can be dangerous for airplanes.
“Bird strikes,” as they are called, can cause engine failure and even plane crashes. The fatal crashes of Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 in 1960 taking off from Boston and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 604 in 1988 landing in Addis Ababa were caused by bird strikes.
Even Ryanair, Europe’s best-rated airline for safety, has had bird incidents. In 2008, a flight from Frankfurt to Rome encountered a flock of starlings as it approached Ciampino Airport. Both engines failed and although the plane landed safely, two crew members and eight passengers were hospitalized. The eight-month-old Boeing 737 was written off.
Perhaps the most famous bird incident was the 2009 US Airways “Miracle on the Hudson” flight, which flew from New York to Charlotte under the command of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. The plane collided with a flock of Canada geese during takeoff, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River.