An Air India flight from New Delhi to the US state of New Jersey was forced to turn back after a bat flew around the passenger cabin.
The Boeing 777-300ER was about 30 minutes into its flight from New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport on Thursday when the animal appeared.
Video taken by a crew member showed the bat hitting the cabin ceiling in the business class section.
Officials said the sighting caused panic among passengers and prompted the pilots to request an emergency landing.
Airport authorities declared an emergency as the plane dumped fuel while circling over Delhi for two hours before touching down.
India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation said the aircraft was fumigated after the passengers disembarked. The bat's body was found in Row 8 of the cabin. The regulator has asked for a detailed investigation into the incident.
The passengers continued their journey on another Air India plane.
An airline official told The National that the bat could have entered the plane through a loading vehicle such as a catering lorry.
India’s flag carrier has regularly hit the headlines for the appearance of animals on board, mostly rats which pose a serious threat to the safety of flights as they can chew through wires and damage internal controls.
Last year, passengers raised the alarm after spotting a rat in the cabin on a flight to Delhi from the northern city of Varanasi city.
The aircraft turned back to Varanasi, but the rat was not found.
In 2019, an Air India flight from Hyderabad to Visakhapatnam was stranded on the tarmac for 12 hours as pest control staff hunted for a rat.
Another rat sighting forced an Air India plane carrying more than 200 passengers to return to Mumbai almost three hours into a flight to London in December 2015.
MOUNTAINHEAD REVIEW
Starring: Ramy Youssef, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman
Director: Jesse Armstrong
Rating: 3.5/5
Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat
Barbara J King, University of Chicago Press
Know your cyber adversaries
Cryptojacking: Compromises a device or network to mine cryptocurrencies without an organisation's knowledge.
Distributed denial-of-service: Floods systems, servers or networks with information, effectively blocking them.
Man-in-the-middle attack: Intercepts two-way communication to obtain information, spy on participants or alter the outcome.
Malware: Installs itself in a network when a user clicks on a compromised link or email attachment.
Phishing: Aims to secure personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.
Ransomware: Encrypts user data, denying access and demands a payment to decrypt it.
Spyware: Collects information without the user's knowledge, which is then passed on to bad actors.
Trojans: Create a backdoor into systems, which becomes a point of entry for an attack.
Viruses: Infect applications in a system and replicate themselves as they go, just like their biological counterparts.
Worms: Send copies of themselves to other users or contacts. They don't attack the system, but they overload it.
Zero-day exploit: Exploits a vulnerability in software before a fix is found.
German plea
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the German parliament that. Russia had erected a new wall across Europe.
"It's not a Berlin Wall -- it is a Wall in central Europe between freedom and bondage and this Wall is growing bigger with every bomb" dropped on Ukraine, Zelenskyy told MPs.
Mr Zelenskyy was applauded by MPs in the Bundestag as he addressed Chancellor Olaf Scholz directly.
"Dear Mr Scholz, tear down this Wall," he said, evoking US President Ronald Reagan's 1987 appeal to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate.
THE BIO
BIO:
Born in RAK on December 9, 1983
Lives in Abu Dhabi with her family
She graduated from Emirates University in 2007 with a BA in architectural engineering
Her motto in life is her grandmother’s saying “That who created you will not have you get lost”
Her ambition is to spread UAE’s culture of love and acceptance through serving coffee, the country’s traditional coffee in particular.
Our legal consultant
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
The specs
- Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8
- Power: 640hp
- Torque: 760nm
- On sale: 2026
- Price: Not announced yet
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THE DETAILS
Kaala
Dir: Pa. Ranjith
Starring: Rajinikanth, Huma Qureshi, Easwari Rao, Nana Patekar
Rating: 1.5/5
