The pilots of an SAS Scandinavian Airlines flight from Stockholm to the Spanish holiday island of Malaga were forced to turn back nearly two hours into the flight last Saturday after passengers spotted a rodent stowaway on board the Airbus A320.
This story might seem off enough on its own, but what’s really bizarre is that it’s less than a year and a half since another SAS flight headed to Malaga also had to divert when a mouse was spotted in the cabin.
The February 7 incident occurred as SAS flight SK-1583 was flying over Belgium, around an hour and a half into the four-hour flight to Malaga.
As the Airbus A320neo was flying at around 37,000 feet above Europe, the pilots reported that passengers had seen a mouse in the cabin and that they needed to return to Stockholm to have the stowaway removed.
The passengers ended up on a three-hour flight to nowhere, landing back in the Swedish capital, where the plane was taken out of service for the rest of the day while engineers worked to rid the aircraft of the rodent and any of its friends.
While passengers described the mouse as small, a rodent could still cause some pretty serious damage to an aircraft.
Unlike other pests like cockroaches or even bed bugs, rodents are particularly troublesome for airlines due to the risk of them chewing through flight-critical cabling.
In this case, the decision was likely taken to fly the plane back to Stockholm because that’s where SAS has its own engineers who could give the plane a thorough check over before giving it the green light to return to service.
SAS has some experience dealing with this type of incident after another of its planes flying from Oslo to Malaga on September 19, 2024, was forced to divert after a mouse jumped out of a passenger’s food tray and began scurrying around the cabin in front of stunned passengers.
Just two months later, a TAP Air Portugal Airbus A321neo was grounded at Ponta Delgada Airport in the Azores after a horde of as many as 130 hamsters which were being transported in the cargo hold, managed to escape their cages during the flight from Lisbon.
Upon the plane’s arrival in the Azores, baggage handlers opened up the hold of the plane to discover a hamster scurrying around. They quickly realized that the cages had been damaged during the flight and most of the hamsters had escaped.
While ground workers were able to quickly round up most of the escapees, the plane had to be grounded until every last hamster had been found.
