An Air France jet ran into a stray cow as it landed in the southern Nigerian oil city of Port Harcourt on Wednesday, airport and airline officials said, adding that no one was injured in the incident.
The Airbus A330 passenger liner was arriving overnight from Paris with roughly 200 people on board when it drove into a herd that had somehow strayed on to the tarmac, said Air France’s spokesperson in Nigeria, Moyo Areola.
Airport workers were trying to round up the surviving cattle more than three hours after the accident, said a control tower official in Port Harcourt.
”The plane hit the cow on the runway. No one was hurt, but the runway has been blocked. Right now, flight operations are halted; no landing, no takeoff,” another airport official, who asked not to be named, said by telephone.
”It is a puzzle. We are trying to figure out how the animal got to the place. But the joy is that nobody was injured and the plane was not damaged. All the passengers have been evacuated,” she added.
Areola said: ”There were cows on the runway, but the aircraft landed safely. The passengers have all disembarked. We are probably not going to fly out today until we are sure the plane is undamaged.”
Passengers at Lagos airport said their flights to Port Harcourt were delayed by several hours and that a tannoy announcement had said at least five cows were loose in the airport and were being chased by ground crew.
Port Harcourt is the main centre of Nigeria’s multibillion-dollar oil industry and several international and domestic carriers serve its small, single-runway airport.
The incident is only the latest in a series of freak accidents in Nigeria involving stray cows.
Last month, police in Lagos arrested a cow after it attacked and killed a bus driver who stopped to urinate by the side of the road.
And 25 people were killed in May when a truck carrying traders to market swerved to avoid a cow and ploughed into a crowded cross-country bus. — Sapa-AFP