Airplane Grounded for Days After 132 Hamsters Escape

portugal - A passenger plane has been grounded at Ponta Delgada Airport in the Portuguese Azores for days after 132 hamsters managed to escape from the aircraft.

A passenger plane has been grounded at Ponta Delgada Airport in the Portuguese Azores since last Tuesday after 132 hamsters escaped from the plane.

The passenger plane departed from Lisbon last Tuesday headed for Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel in the Azores. In addition to luggage from the passengers, there was also a shipment for a pet store: over a hundred hamsters, some ferrets, and birds, as reported by the Portuguese news site Correio de Manha.

When the ground crew tried to unload the cargo at the destination, they noticed that the boxes containing the rodents were damaged and the hamsters had escaped. Due to the risk of the animals chewing through cables, it was decided that the plane would not immediately return to Lisbon.

On Saturday, sixteen of the over a hundred rodents were still loose in the Airbus 320, according to Correio de Manha. The newspaper Portugal Resident reported that the remaining hamsters were found over the weekend. The extent of the damage and when the plane can take off again are currently unclear.