The incident took place when the place had risen to 31,000 feet. (Representational Pic)
A flight was forced to turn back after to its origin airport after a horse became loose in the cargo hold. According to ABC News, the Boeing 777 was heading to Belgium from New York on Thursday and was airborne for 90 minutes. Citing an audio clip obtained by You Can See ATC, the outlet reported that the horse got loose within 30 minutes of take-off. The plane had risen to 31,000 feet by then and a pilot had to make the desperate call to air traffic control.
The flight said a horse had escaped from its stall and that they needed to return to JFK, according to FlightRadar24.
"We are a cargo plane with a live animal, a horse, on board. The horse managed to escape its stall. There's no issue with flying, but we need to go back to New York as we can't re-secure the horse," the pilot told the ATC, according to the ABC News report.
After dumping the fuel, the pilot requested a veterinarian to be present at JFK when the plane arrived.
You Can See ATC has posted a reconstruction of events with flight number CC4592 on its YouTube channel. However, it remains unclear how the horse managed to escape but it remained unrestrained until the plane landed at JFK, according to the audio.
Flightradar24 shows the flight taking off again a few hours later and landing successfully in Liege after approximately six hours.
Air Atlanta Icelandic, the airline operating the flight, has not issued any official statement about the incident.
Independent said this is not the first incident where a flight had to make an unscheduled landings.
It mentioned an incident that took place in July this year, when a mid-air brawl between passengers caused one flight in the US to make a landing nearly 1,200 kilometres away from its intended destination.
In October, a flight bound for Tampa in Florida had to return to Panama after an adult nappy was mistaken for a bomb, the outlet further said.