By Bulletin Staff
A transport plane carrying a cargo of the undead bound for Japan was forced to return to Los Angeles Airport last week after several of the living dead broke out of confinement in midflight, prompting an urgent request to land the plane back at LAX.
The incident brought fresh attention to the specialized companies involved in the high-risk business of transporting the undead around the globe, an industry that critics describe as poorly regulated and a potential danger to the public.
In the LAX incident, a 737 transport plane operated by the company Zomtrans Global took off last Thursday morning bound for Tokyo with a cargo of 43 undead, according to sources at the Federal Aviation Administration who requested anonymity to speak freely of the incident.
Approximately 25 minutes after takeoff, the pilot radioed air traffic control (ATC) and requested permission to return to LAX due to an “undead-related incident onboard.”
Asked by ATC to clarify the nature of the incident, the pilot reportedly responded, “We are carrying a cargo of undead, and we understand from our security crew that several of the individuals in transport have broken out of confinement.”
ATC then asked whether the pilot was declaring an in-flight undead emergency (IUE), which would have prompted LAX to activate its zombie emergency plan, shutting down the airport and requiring the plane remain on the tarmac after landing so that the FAA’s Special Undead Response unit could board the 737 and eliminate any threat.
However, the pilot responded in the negative and said that the escaped individuals have been contained in the cargo hold. According to the FAA sources, after the plane returned to LAX, it taxied immediately to Zomtrans’ hanger facility, where the company apparently used its own armed response team to regain control of the cargo hold with an unspecified number of casualties.
Zomtrans declined to comment on the incident or to answer questions about whether any of the plane’s crew were bitten and turned. However, the FAA sources reported that at least four Zomtrans crew members on the plane were apparently killed in a melee with the undead in the cargo hold while the aircraft was still in the air.
An FAA spokesperson said that the agency’s Office of Undead Investigations has opened up an inquiry into the incident and that no further official comment would be forthcoming until the probe is complete.
Registered in the Bahamas, Zomtrans has been hauling the undead around the globe for more than 20 years, according to its website. The company boasts that it has a “100% containment and 0% contamination record,” and it claims to have transported more than 10,000 of the living dead on its aircraft “without a single bite incident.”
Jamal Hussein, an independent zombie transportation consultant, declined to comment specifically on the LAX incident or on Zomtrans, but he said that it is extremely rare for undead to break out of confinement when they are being moved as cargo on airplanes due to the precautions typically taken to ensure against escapes, bites or other incidents.
Onboard a zombie transport plane, Hussein explained, the undead are kept in highly secure containers with multiple manual and electronic failsafes to prevent breakouts. Security crew on the plane typically are armed and include ex-military personnel who have been in combat against zombies in the past.
Asked to speculate on how an escape could occur onboard a zombie transport, Hussein said that it is possible that severe turbulence could cause a container unit to dislodge from its mooring, sending it crashing into other containers and leading one or more of the units to break open.
“These containment units are tough, but you get enough boxes banging together hard enough, and it’s conceivable that you could have some zombie spillage,” Hussein said.
The FAA sources declined to comment on whether turbulence might have been behind the LAX incident, but they noted that several planes in the skies around the airport had reported heavy chop during landing and takeoff.
Allan Barkin, who runs a YouTube channel called “Zombies on the Move” that covers undead transportation, said that the LAX incident points to the need for greater regulation and oversight of the companies that specialize in undead cargo.
“The Department of Transportation has more than 500 inspectors focused on ensuring the safe transport of the living dead on the nation’s roads, but the FAA doesn’t have a single zombie-focused inspector on staff to monitor the undead air cargo companies,” Barkin said.
Instead, he said, companies like Zomtrans are supposed to voluntarily comply with standards that the industry itself creates. “It’s like putting the zombies in charge of the henhouse. At some point, you’re probably going to wind up with a bunch of dead hens,” Barkin said.
But Hussein pushed back on the idea that the cargo firms in this space are operating unsafely. “The companies that do this kind of work have a lot of experience managing the risks of the living dead, and their worst nightmare is a planeload of zombies crashing in a Kansas wheatfield and setting off an outbreak that wipes out Topeka,” the consultant said.
“Everyone understands that hauling zombies is not the same as transporting horses around the sky,” Hussein added.
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