A dog which has been on the loose at Cape Town International Airport for the past week is causing havoc by running onto the runway as aircraft are about to land, according to this report on local aviation website Avcom. On one occasion, the pilot was forced to go around twice before landing safely on the third attempt.

The report claims that all attempts to catch the errant hound – which appears at the same time every day – have proved fruitless.

If the story is to be believed, it seems that none of the dogcatchers know much about dogs: chasing a frightened animal with a huge, yellow fire truck across a wide open space isn’t going to be very effective. Which is why, a week later, the dog is free and the fire truck has had to be dug out of the sand once.

Free Dog 1, Cape Town Airport 0.

Dogs and aircraft don’t mix well but of course dogs usually don’t know that until it’s too late. Mix shoddy airport fencing with a large local stray dog population and you have the makings of crisis such as that faced daily by pilots landing at Mumbai, Bangalore (where sometimes, they are on the runway, sometimes they are waiting to catch a flight, apparently) and Pune airports in India.

Hitting a fairly large animal during take-off or landing could be disastrous, as happened in Harare recently when an Air Zimbabwe aircraft hit two wild pigs on take-off, causing the plane to veer off the runway when its nose gear collapsed. The passengers and crew escaped unhurt although two passengers were injured when they fell into a ditch while running from the stricken aircraft.

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