BRENT PIN­HEIRO
brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

The Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port was forced to sus­pend run­way op­er­a­tion just af­ter 7 am on Wednes­day. The cause? Two dogs in the vicin­i­ty of the run­way.

Sev­er­al flights were ground­ed as a re­sult of the run­way clo­sure—in­clud­ing flights to To­ba­go, the US, St. Vin­cent & the Grenadines, and Ja­maica.

BW1503’s flight path. Image courtesy: Flightradar24.com

BW1503 de­part­ed Crown Point, To­ba­go at 7:17am but was forced to re­turn af­ter cir­cling for over 30 min­utes over the Gulf of Paria. That flight was on­ly able to de­part for Trinidad at 9:20 am. D51320, a DHL car­go flight in­bound from Cu­ra­cao was al­so forced to di­vert to Bridgetown, Bar­ba­dos.

Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er for the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty Zo­la Joseph con­firmed the in­ci­dent, telling Guardian Me­dia the sit­u­a­tion was “quick­ly con­tained.” Ac­cord­ing to AATT, flight op­er­a­tions were halt­ed in the in­ter­est of safe­ty and it re­sumed at 8:37 am. BW1504 was the first plane to de­part the air­port. It re­mains un­clear how the dogs were able to ac­cess the air­port grounds. Flight op­er­a­tions re­sumed just be­fore 9 am with BW1504 be­ing the first plane to de­part.

It re­mains un­clear how the dogs were able to ac­cess the run­way, as well as their cur­rent state.

This is not the first time a dog has caused an air­port to halt flight op­er­a­tions. In 2020, a res­cue dog named Crys­tal caused Cana­da’s Toron­to Pear­son Air­port to close tem­porar­i­ly af­ter it es­caped from a British Air­ways plane. It took 13 hours be­fore Crys­tal could be re­cap­tured.

Ed­i­tor’s note: This ar­ti­cle has been up­dat­ed to re­flect the lo­ca­tion of the dogs as well as fur­ther de­tails from the AATT.