Kicker: Fasten your seatbelts

NICK EICHER, HOST: A horse is a horse (of course) but when a horse is on the loose during a transatlantic flight, it’s a whole other story.

It happened last week about a half hour after takeoff from New York to Belgium. The Boeing 747 pilot radioed air-traffic control.

PILOT: Atlanta four nine five two. Go ahead.

So the pilot explains calm and concise.

PILOT: We are a cargo plane. We have a live animal, a horse, on board the airplane and the horse managed to escape its stall. We need to return to New York. We cannot get the horse back secure.

This is not the run of the mill unruly passenger who won’t obey the fasten-seatbelt sign. But I’ve got to believe if there’s one word you don’t want to hear in flight, it’s the word “stall.”

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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