And if you look to your left...

I remember a few months back reading a news article about a plane in Christchurch that had reported seeing something weird as they came in to land.  What, you ask?  Was it a flock of birds, a runaway kite, a UFO?  Oh no, what they reported would have actually made a UFO seem like a reasonable thing to report.  They saw a flying great white shark!

Seriously, you couldn't make this shit up!

It turned out there wasn't some sort of mutant shark breed that had learned not only to breathe air, but also how to fly.  It was just a remote controlled toy that had gotten away from it's owner and somehow made it up to a thousand feet before the pilot saw it.  Poor bugger, he must have thought he was going insane!  You're in a plane, flying through the sky, and out to the left you see a one and a half metre great white swimming by?  You'd HAVE to be questioning your sanity at that point.

If I saw this outside my plane window, I know I'd freak out.

You can just imagine the conversations going on inside the cockpit.

"Phil."


"Yeah George?"


"Are you sure we didn't crash in the ocean or something?"


"Pretty sure, why?"


"No reason ... it's just there's a ruddy great shark on the left side of the plane."


"George, you've got to start laying off the tequila."

But you know what the funniest thing about that article was?  It wasn't the fact that it was about a remote control flying shark, cause come on ... COOL!  It wasn't about how I couldn't help snickering when I thought of the passengers, and what they must have thought when they looked out the window to see Jaws flying by.

No, it was a quote from Glen Kenny, the New Zealand Air Line Pilots' Association President that had me snickering.  When asked what he thought about it, he said "It says it's an indoor toy on the box.  If you take them outside and the wind gets them, they can be goneburgers, so you've got to be a bit careful."

Goneburgers?  I'm totally using that, Captain Kenny.

The flying shark made by a group called Air Swimmers, which also makes a flying clown fish.  I'm so tempted to buy one just for the Finding Nemo jokes alone!