An Air Serbia flight found itself taking a hasty detour while en route from Belgrade to Düsseldorf on Sunday — one to the Serbian airport’s opposing runway and straight into a bunch of landing equipment.


Due to a series of unknown circumstances, an Embraer E-195 at Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport wound up halfway down the runway without having started accelerating for takeoff. With only 4,260 feet left for it to hoist itself into the air, the commercial flight’s crew was still confident they could swing it.



While the plane was ultimately able to take flight, it overran the runway and smashed into several lights on an adjacent landing strip, sustaining enough damage that the pilots opted to head back to the airport just 40 minutes into the flight.




No passengers or crew members were seriously injured in the ordeal; however, the same could not be said of the airplane, which suffered serious gashes in its fuselage and on its left wing.  




Honestly, it seems like everyone on board was pretty lucky. It could have been so much worse — they could have been flying Alaska Airlines.