A jet plane belonging to Lion Air crashed into three cows which had wandered onto the runway at the Jalaluddin airport in Gorontalo, Sulawesi Island.

None of the passengers were hurt but the same cannot be said about one of the three cows that faced the full power of the Boeing 737-800 plane that was coming in for landing. The plane skidded off the runway and into the fields. The airport has since been closed.

An incident of "bird hit" or "bird strike" is known to pilots. Birds sometimes hit the windscreen of the plane and sometimes fly into the engine causing damage to the plane and sometimes human casualties also have been known to occur.

This bizarre incident is one for the history books and pilots may have never heard of a "cow hit" before. Stray dogs have been known to wander onto the runway and airport authorities across the world are mindful of such incidents.

Under the Radar

Lion Air had been banned by the European Union in the year 2007 as the carrier was deemed "unsafe". In the year 2012 alone the airline has seen a string of crashes numbering at least four.

Nonetheless, Lion Air was not the only carrier to be banned in the European Union and since then the ban has been lifted in the year 2009. But after the plane crashes in 2012 Lion Air has been put on the radar for not complying with international safety standards.

It is interesting to note that the Indonesian airline industry is growing at record pace and Lion Air wants to take advantage of that growth by ordering over 234 planes from Airbus for over 24 billion dollars in March 2013.

The company has been working hard after all the bad press it got and it remains to be seen whether incidents such as these will be ignored as mere flukes or examined closely.