Cat on a plane: Air Canada flight delayed by runaway feline

Forget snakes on a plane: a cat that got loose on an Air Canada plane grounded the Halifax-Toronto flight for four hours today.

The cat was brought onto the plane in a pet carrier by a passenger on Air Canada flight 603, but it somehow got loose, The Globe and Mail reported.

The animal managed to scamper into wiring in the cockpit, evading its owner and flight crew members, the Globe said.

Passengers had to get off the plane while a maintenance crew took apart paneling in the cockpit and managed to coax the cat out, before inspecting the electrical wiring for damage.

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Both the cat and the aircraft were unharmed, but the plane's scheduled 5:40 a.m. takeoff was delayed until 10 a.m., Peter Spurway, a spokesman for the Halifax airport authority, told the newspaper.

Spurway, who believed the cat's name to be Ripples, said this is first time he’s heard of a cat loose in an airplane cabin.

"[The cat] was fine,'' Spurway told Postmedia News. "Scared, but fine.''

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In another recent Air Canada incident, drunken and unruly executives from Research in Motion, maker of Blackberry smartphones, forced the diversion of a Toronto-to-Beijing flight in November.

Crew members restrained the men with plastic handcuffs and tape, but they managed to “chew their way through their restraints," according to reports.

Earlier this month, an Air Canada jet traveling from Toronto to the Turks and Caicos islands made an emergency landing after reporting hydraulic problems. None of the passengers were injured.

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