A Southwest Airlines plane traveling to Phoenix had to make an emergency landing in Tennessee on Wednesday morning. Shortly after departing Nashville International Airport at 5:13 a.m. local time, flight 577 was forced to turn around due to a flock of birds that flew into the path of the craft and presumably died horribly, according to airline spokeswoman Michelle Agnew.
The latest news is just another incident in a horrible string of bad luck and nightmare press the airline has been receiving over the course of the past week. On Saturday, another Southwest Airlines flight had to briefly ground in Panama City after attempting to land at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans in severe weather, terrifying passengers. A local news reporter had happened to be on the flight, and the story soon received national attention.
A couple of days later, Southwest Airlines flight 1380 headed from New York City to Dallas suffered an engine explosion, which caused flying shrapnel to break through a window and partially suck a woman through it. Fortunately for Southwest, the positive spin to that story is that the disaster could have been so much worse had it not been for the “nerves of steel” possessed by pilot Tammie Jo Shults, who calmly navigated the plane to land in nearby Philadelphia.
They say bad things happen in threes, so barring a curse from a voodoo priestess, maybe this will be the last of Southwest’s problems in the immediate future. In the meantime, I’m taking Delta.
(Via The Tennessean)