1

“Passenger Pete Atkinson said there was a tense five-minute gap between the aircraft climbing sharply away from the runway and the pilot announcing the badger’s presence.” Apparently, it was a runway badger and not a run away badger.

Also, here’s the official Spiceworks badger badge thread. Perhaps we need an Airborne Badger badge, too: Spiceworks Badger badge

11 Spice ups
2

Did nobody have a firearm? This seems like a non-issue if you have a .22 or something.

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3

Doesn’t surprise me. We had a twin engine Cessna hit a jack rabbit once. Plane ended up off the runway with major damage when the plane hit, careened off the runway, and the gear collapsed… Fortunately the worse thing that the pilot and crew experienced were some aches and pains associated with the sudden, nerve racking stop.

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4

Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger airplane airplane

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5

It was a honey badger and it didn’t give a sh!t!

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6

I find it amusing that when I go to the page to read about a Badger and a FlyBe plane… the entire top of the page is an ad for Air China.

But… yeah an obstacle on the runway, especially something as… tough as a badger could cause issues if it was hit by a descending plane.

7

Honey Badger FTW. Or it could have been its cousin the Wolverine if it were here in AK. They’re bad vertically challenged beasties.

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8

A suspected badger…

Honey badger don’t care!

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9

It’s a town in England. Even the police don’t carry guns without a special directive.

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10

And personally, I like to keep my planes and firearms separate.

(Sure ground crew could… whatever, but really? No)

besides I’m not sure a dead… or pissed off, badger is less of an issue for a plane.

11

Ok that’s a new one

12

I’ll just leave this here:

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13

In gif form because we can do that now and it’s the most appropriate here:

sv7aXX7.gif

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14

You don’t want to be hitting any critters larger than an insect with an airplane. Even a small bird can do a surprisingly large amount of damage. I almost hit a deer that suddenly ran out in front of me on the landing rollout after touching down at Lakeway airport near Lake Travis just northwest of Austin once. My plane was still rolling at about 50-60 MPH and the impact would’ve destroyed the plane and probably seriously injured or killed me. I hit the brakes (brakes on small planes work very poorly) and veered towards the yards of those big fancy homes that border the west side of the runway, and was almost to the grass about to careen thru someone’s yard when the deer suddenly did a 180 and darted back away from the center of the runway, barely missing my plane. Made for quite the adrenaline rush.

15

Couldn’t resist this. British viewers of a certain age will get a flashback to their childhood and go “Aah…”, the rest of the world will go “Huh?”

badger2.jpg

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16

Badgers can be dangerous dead or alive. We lost a brother from our motorcycle club back in 2003 when he hit a dead badger on a blind bend at about 50mph and was thrown clear of his bike.