Sometimes, even when driving a normal, passenger vehicle, it’s easy to roll up to an especially low overpass with some skepticism you’ll actually be able to clear it. So we can only imagine the brilliant, beaming audacity of the driver of this truck hauling a scrapped passenger jet in India, who found their cargo stuck underneath a bridge in the city of Motihari on Friday. Most of the plane made it through, but the tail sure didn’t!
The aircraft, which was supposedly being transported to Assam where the fuselage was to be converted into a restaurant according to KameraOne, was previously flown by Air India. When it struck Piprakothi bridge during its 950-mile journey across the country last week, it took the combined efforts of police, other truck drivers, and locals to dislodge the Airbus A320 and get traffic moving again after several hours. In some footage that’s been shared online, you can see people tending to the truck’s tires, possibly to let some air out to gain a few precious centimeters of space.
As it turns out, planes getting stuck under bridges is not an uncommon occurrence in India. The last notable time this happened was in November 2022, when another cocksure truck driver wedged a fuselage underneath an overpass in the Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh. This also happened elsewhere in the country in 2021 below a pedestrian footpath (must’ve been some view), as well as in 2019.
Technically, since this latest incident happened on December 29, we haven’t had our almost-annual (chalk 2020 up to a pandemic year, no?) plane jam for 2024 yet. Watch this space, because as soon as we catch wind, I’ll be sure to share the news here with you.
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