Freezing Siberian Cold Leads to Positively Amazing Airplane Push

Image courtesy of YouTube

As if weather conditions in Siberia weren’t demanding enough, a group of passengers hoping to fly home had to get out and push their plane first.

The Siberian Times (h/t Digg) reports a recent flight took off thanks to some elbow grease from fellow passengers.

It all went down at Igarka airport in Krasnoyarsk, all while temperatures reached a whopping “minus 52C.”

Fortunately, no amazing deed goes unseen nowadays. Thanks to the publication’s YouTube channel we get to see what pushing a plane out of some Siberian ice looks like.

Let us never whine about flight delays again.

Because of a grease mix-up, upwards of 70 passengers were needed to help free the Tupolev 134, which weighs all of 30 tons.

Per the report: “Problems developed on one of the coldest days of the year because the wrong kind of grease was used for the landing gear - unsuitable for Far North locations.”

The plane was air ready, but the problem was that it was stuck to the ground. A tractor was employed but it too was nonfunctional thanks to the biting cold. According to the report, “its brake pads were frozen.”

Where machines fail, humans step in and show the mechanical beasts a thing or two about getting things done.

One passenger was quoted as saying, “Real men can plant a tree, build a house, and push a plane,” which makes us weary of ever testing our manhood.

Another passenger is quoted as proclaiming that, “We just want to get back home,” leading us to a happy ending for those involved in the precarious predicament:

“The plane later took off and landed safely in Krasnoyarsk. Most of the passengers were oil and gas workers on their way home after a stint in the Arctic production fields.”

We have heard of cars being stuck in ice, mud or any other road annoyance. However we have to file this into the box of truly odd airplane dilemmas.

Let’s just all be thankful that the passengers weren’t asked to carry this thing to their ultimate destination.

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