JFK Turtles Explain Runway Crawl On Twitter
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Tiny terrapin turtles who crossed Kennedy Airport's runway 4-L Wednesday morning and delayed flights in their search for a place to lay their eggs, now have a Twitter account, Jay Dow reports.
An anonymous jokester named JFKTurtles created the fake account and explained "We go straight to the runway because it takes 5 hours to get out of our shells for the TSA."
Flight delays averaged 30-minutes, as planes were diverted to other runways and ground crews removed the turtles for transportation to a beach in Jamaica Bay, which borders JFK.
"American 1009, there's a report of a turtle on the runway. Do you want to have it removed first?" asked an air traffic controller at Kennedy.
"Sure," one pilot joked.
Airport officials estimate 150 turtles eventually clogged the runway.
"We've got a couple of turtles storming the access road here off our right," a JetBlue pilot said.
"Do we really use the word storming about a turtle?" an unidentified person replied.
The turtle's migration happens every year here, most recently in 2009, and is just the latest example of Mother Nature complicating air travel.
A bird strike forced a JetBlue plane to make an emergency landing at JFK back on May 15. Not to mention the miraculous landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River, caused by another bird strike on January 15, 2009
Jet Blue, explaining the delays, tweeted this explanation: "Running over turtles is not healthy for them nor is it good for our tires."
The airline later wrote on its blog, "the turtles were unsuccessful in getting on a flight to the Caribbean. Maybe next time fellas."
What do you think of Kennedy Airport's reaction to the turtles? Sound off in our comments section below…
