Escapes From Cage on Flight to New York : Mischievous Monkey ‘Takes Over’ 747

A monkey from Manila broke out of its cage in a China Airlines 747 cargo plane that landed at Kennedy Airport today, chasing the pilot and co-pilot from the cockpit and playing with the controls before it was caught.

“He wasn’t making any demands,” joked John Schneider, animal control officer from the Port Authority, who finally caught the 15-pound macaque monkey.

“He wasn’t trying to take the plane back home,” he added with a chuckle.

The feisty primate--who turned out to be a female--was part of a shipment of 60 research monkeys flown in from Manila.

Somehow, it managed to slip out of one of the 12 cages in the cargo hold and, cheered on by the raucous screeches of its fellow travelers, crawled in between the walls of the plane to the flight deck, Schneider said. Then it went on a 90-minute spree, prowling the plane at will until Schneider finally captured him about 5:30 a.m.

The noise and the sight of the monkey cavorting around the jet chased workers away from the jet, while the pilot and co-pilot took refuge in the cockpit,

“The pilot and the co-pilot didn’t want to come out because they said the monkey had trapped them up there,” Schneider said.

“I yelled out to the guys in the cockpit that I had him corralled in the back of the plane and told them, ‘This is your chance to get out.’ They left.

“He was so small he could get anywhere he wanted to go,” Schneider said. “I got him to swing toward the cockpit and that’s where I captured him.”

“I caught him sitting on the instrument panel right between the pilot and co-pilot seats in the flight deck.”

Schneider said the crew knew the monkey was loose in flight after they left Anchorage, Alaska.

He said the monkeys were imported for research purposes. They were headed for Charles River Research in nearby Port Washington on Long Island, where they were to be distributed around the country.