A flight from Oslo to Malaga was forced to make an emergency diversion on Wednesday after a mouse jumped out of a passenger’s food tray and started to scurry around the cabin in front of stunned passengers.
The incident happened aboard a SAS Scandinavian Airlines flight that departed the Norwegian capital at around 2 p.m. on September 19 for what should have been a routine three-and-a-half-hour flight to the Spanish holiday destination.
The flight had only made it to coast of Norway, however, when a passenger opened up a food tray that a flight attendant had just served them and out popped a small rodent which jumped onto the cabin floor.
Passengers onboard the Airbus A320 reported that there wasn’t much panic, but it wasn’t long until the Captain came onto the public address system to tell them that they would have to divert due to the mouse posing a safety risk.
After going into two short holding patterns, the aircraft, with up to 180 passengers onboard, landed in Copenhagen, where the passengers had to get off so that engineers could carry out a thorough search for the furry stowaway.
Luckily, SAS was able to find a replacement aircraft for the passengers the flight departed Copenhagen around 5:20 pm and continued onto Malaga where it landed at around 8 pm.
A spokesperson for SAS confirmed to local news channel NRK that a mouse had been spotted onboard flight SK4683, explaining that it was normal procedure to land a plane in this kind of situation so that the plane can be inspected.
Mice and rats can occasionally find their way onto commercial jets, and rodents are considered a pretty significant risk because they could gnaw through electrical wiring, which could pose a big danger.
More commonly, however, unexpected visitors like cockroaches are more likely to turn up on flights unannounced and uninvited. In July, a video of a large cockroach scurrying along the sidewall of a United Airlines plane during boarding went viral as passengers shouted out in panic at seeing the bug.
