Igarka (SIBERIA): What do you do when your flight has been delayed and the plane is stuck in snow? Get out and push! Passengers on a flight in Siberia were asked to do just that on Tuesday when temperatures dropped to minus 52 degrees Celsius at the Igarka airport.
And as the enclosed picture shows, pushing a frozen plane is apparently no big deal in Siberia — because the passengers handled it the way most of us would handle a car stuck in mud.
The extraordinary story emerged after a passenger posted a video on YouTube showing a group of cheery travellers pushing the Tupolev plane on the snow-covered runway in Igarka, which is beyond the Arctic Circle.
“Let’s go,” passengers in thick winter coats shouted and whooped as they put their hands on the wings of the plane and shoved it several metres along the runway. “Everyone wants to go home,” one man said.
Transport prosecutors in western Siberia said they were investigating the incident, which took place on Tuesday. “Due to the low air temperatures, the chassis’s brake system froze and a tow truck was unable to move the plane onto the taxiway to carry out the flight,” prosecutors confirmed in a statement.
Even for Russians inured to long winters of sub-zero temperatures, the passengers’ can-do chutzpah has drawn awed admiration. “Siberians are so tough that for them pushing a frozen plane along a runway is a piece of cake,” said Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.
