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This article was published 09/06/2018 (2953 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This was definitely not a case of pennies from heaven.

It was more an example of — and forgive us for using a salty word you normally don’t see in family newspapers — crap from the clouds.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a drainpipe for the past month, you’ll know a Kelowna motorist and her son made international headlines after complaining they were hit with flying poop from a passing plane while sitting in their car.

Susan Allan and her son, Travis Sweet, told reporters they were stopped at a red light with their sunroof open on May 9 when, suddenly and without warning, their car was filled with a lot more than just spring air.

“We were inundated with poop,” Allan said. “You could feel drops falling from the sky — hitting our face, inside the car, all over the windshield… I had it in my eyes, my hair… There was so much poop.”

She didn’t realize what had happened until she looked at the car next to her, which had also been spattered, and the driver pointed up to the sky where a low-flying plane was coasting just over the airport.

They quickly drove to a nearby car wash to clean themselves and their vehicle — “It was disgusting. My son threw up instantly. I was just gagging from the smell” — before contacting the airport. Transport Canada is investigating whether frozen lavatory waste, called “blue ice,” fell from an aircraft.

It wouldn’t be the first time something unusual has fallen from the sky, as we can see from today’s gravity-intensive list of Five Strange Things That Have Plummeted from Planes:

 

5) The airborne oddity: A U.S. military ammo box

The sudden impact: Imagine sitting at your desk in elementary school, pondering your ABCs, when suddenly, a box of military ammunition crashes through your classroom roof. That would be a story to tell your grandkids. Well, fortunately, there were no students in the vicinity last month when a box of ammunition fell from a military helicopter on a training exercise and smashed through the roof of an elementary school in Texas.

The Ysleta Independent School District said no one was injured when the ammo box slammed into Parkland Elementary School in El Paso, although it left a gaping hole in the roof and caused a power outage in part of the building. In a stroke of luck, the drama unfolded at 3:45 p.m., after classes had ended for the day, and there were no students at the site of the impact.

Military authorities are scrambling to determine how the ammunition fell out of a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from nearby Fort Bliss. Investigators were on the scene within 30 minutes to recover the ammo container, which weighed an estimated 18 kilograms and fell from the chopper at a height of roughly 305 metres.

“I’m extremely sorry for any damage done to the neighbouring elementary school, and I am grateful that no one was injured,” Col. Jay Hopkins, commander of the 1st Armored Division Combat Aviation Brigade, said in a statement. Some parents reportedly expressed concerns about the potential for the ammo to detonate because of the fall, but Fort Bliss officials reassured them there was no threat of rounds being ignited.

The military probe will examine whether the incident was caused by negligence or equipment failure. “The investigation will bear out whether this was individual error or material failure,” Col. Steve Murphy of Fort Bliss said. “We have to do that investigation, and based off that, we will see where need to go next to place the blame.”

 

4) The airborne oddity: A U.S. training missile

The sudden impact: If you don’t mind the odd military-grade weapon landing on your head, then Texas is definitely the place for you. Six years before the ammo box crashed through the ceiling of the El Paso school, a training missile fell off a helicopter and landed near a neighbourhood in Killeen, Texas, prompting the temporary evacuation of about 100 area homes.

According to news reports in May 2012, the 45-kilogram, two-metre missile fell from an Apache AJH-64 helicopter flying around Killeen, near the Fort Hood military base, and landed in a field behind the home of Kenton Davis, a former soldier whose children happened to be playing outside at the time. “I think I broke half of it trying to pull it out until I realized what it was when I lifted it up and read the bottom of it, so… yeah,” Davis told reporters at the time.

In another stroke of luck, the misguided missile was a training device, an M-36 Captive Flight missile, and had neither a warhead nor a propulsion system. It did, however, leave an impressive hole in the field behind Davis’s home.

“Safety is always our No. 1 concern, and we regret the inconvenience to the families affected in the area,” Col. Howard Arey, a Fort Hood aviation officer, told the media. The colonel stressed that military aircraft do not leave the base and fly over populated areas carrying live warheads.

“We want to reassure the public that our military aircraft never fly off the installation with live munitions,” Arey said. He also noted the crew inside the Apache had no way of knowing the training missile had fallen off the helicopter until they were ordered back to the base. So, like, nothing to worry about.

 

3) The airborne oddities: Parachuting beavers

The sudden impact: It sounds like a cute Disney nature movie, but the plot of this bizarre operation was all too real. It seems in the 1940s, after the Second World War, Canada’s national critter was becoming a bit of a handful for the nice folks in Idaho’s department of fish and game. The department’s solution to an overpopulation of beavers in some regions? They packed them into ventilated crates, attached parachutes to cargo lines, then dropped them from small planes into the Idaho wilderness.

OK, technically speaking, the beavers did not fall out of the planes, but we couldn’t help but laugh ourselves silly over the image of parachuting beavers, so we decided to include the story in today’s list.

According to the Alaska Dispatch News, the idea was to disperse the beavers throughout the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, “where the beavers would then find their way into various drainages, build dams and help foster the habitat for other species, such as deer, elk and moose.” Fieldandstream.com notes the only way to get the nuisance critters into the remote areas was via airplane, so conservation officer Elmo Heter got the idea to strap a parachute on a beaver named Geronimo.

“Heter designed a box to carry a beaver that sprung open when it landed, and with the war over, he had access to surplus parachutes,” the website recalls. “After a series of tests, Heter was satisfied with his ‘delivery method’ and Geronimo was the first beaver dropped from the sky.”

The fish and game department even produced a film entitled Fur for the Future that chronicled the skydiving beavers, but it was mislabelled and stored in the wrong file — until fish and game historian Sharon Clark found the fragile film in 2015, and it was released on YouTube.

In one video clip, a rogue rodent is parachuted into a meadow and the 1950s-era narrator chirps: “The box opens and a most unusual and novel trip ends for Mr. Beaver. He’s on his way now… There’s room here for a new home.” At least 75 beavers were relocated in this manner, and all reportedly survived the drop.

 

2) The airborne oddity: A fortune in gold

The sudden impact: It’s not unusual for debris to periodically plunge from airplanes. Most of the time, however, it’s pretty mundane stuff — access panels, fuselage doors, turbine blades, engine parts and frozen sewage.

But last month in Siberia, a Soviet-era cargo plane accidentally dumped a load that would have had a crew of swarthy pirates swashing their buckles with excitement.

The Antonov AN-12 plane was taking off from Yakutsk airport carrying 9.3 tons of precious metals when its cargo door buckled under shifting weight, bursting open and spewing dozens and dozens of bars of what was thought to be gold into the frosty air. The bars, worth a reported US$368 million, came from the Kupol gold mine in the Chukotka region, investigators said.

It turns out the bars were “doré,” a semi-pure alloy of gold and silver — not pure gold, but close enough to spur an impromptu gold rush. Noted the New York Times: “News reports of gold from the sky spread like wildfire, prompting an outpouring on social media.

The plane returned to the runway, and officials later reported all the precious cargo was recovered. The airport was cordoned off, but curious treasure seekers reportedly poured into the area in search of contraband riches.

“I will go to search at night when guards will be sleeping,” a local man told the Siberian Times. “To dig, to dig and to dig, before dawn.” A total of 172 gold bars weighing 3.4 tons were later recovered from the area, an Interior Ministry official told Tass, Russia’s largest news agency.

“Only part of the gold fell out — altogether there were around nine tons in there,” the official said. Still, some residents apparently believe some of the bars might have fallen in a snow-covered swamp not far from the airport. “Such things can only happen here,” one Instagram user wrote after driving by the scene, according to the Times.

 

1) The airborne oddity: A landing wheel

The sudden impact: It seems wheels, from time to time, fall from airplanes and land in unusual places. For instance, in June 2015, the front wheel of a small business jet fell off and crashed through the roof of a third-floor apartment in St-Laurent, Que., minutes before the plane landed at the Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport in Montreal. There were no injuries.

But scary things like that don’t happen in Winnipeg, right? Wrong! This columnist was working on a Monday night in July 1982 when a local man came within metres of being crushed to death after a landing wheel fell from a low-flying aircraft and dropped through the roof of his top-floor Grant Avenue apartment.

A front-page story in the Free Press on July 6, 1982, written by Cecil Rosner, noted Mark Paul, 33, a Winnipeg office worker, was standing in the kitchen of his third-floor condo at 1002 Grant Ave. when the 181-kilogram wheel came crashing through the roof.

“It just scared the hell out of me,” Paul, who was uninjured, said as he stood among the debris scattered throughout the one-bedroom suite. The wheel had wedged itself on the floor between the narrow kitchen and what remained of Paul’s clothes closet. “I was in shock for a while… but as soon as I saw it I realized what happened.”

A Transport Canada investigator told the newspaper the wheel fell from an Aero Trades DC-4 plane which was at an estimated 425 metres while it was on its landing path to the airport. Despite the loss of the wheel, the plane, equipped with two main landing wheels on each side, landed safely. It was estimated the wheel would have been travelling about 320 km/h when it punched a 1.2-metre hole in Paul’s roof.

“I saw the wheel drop from the plane and I thought, ‘My God, it’s going to land on that roof,” witness Betty Wilson, who had been walking down the street with her husband, told the Free Press. “We live in a similar type of place, but I can’t believe you can be standing there one minute and flat as a pancake the next.”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca