MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- Passengers were buckled up when a crew member spotted a mouse darting across an aisle, triggering a chase that grounded a Qatar Airways plane at Manila airport for more than 12 hours.
The airline asked the 243 passengers to disembark, unloaded hundreds of pieces of luggage and brought the Airbus 330-200 to a hangar for a two-hour fumigation, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star reported. The rodent was never found, so it either escaped or there's a dead mouse aboard the plane.
''There was an incident before with a cockroach, but it's the first time that we had to deal with a mouse, and it delayed a flight,'' Octavio Lina, operations chief of the Manila International Airport Authority, was quoted as saying.
He explained that rodents are a danger to airplanes because they can chew up important electrical wiring.
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