The driving forces behind Nepal’s national state-run airline have found a novel way to fix a technical problem with their airplanes — they’ve sacrificed goats to appeal to the Hindu ‘sky god’, Akash Bhairab. Sacrificing animals is an ancient tradition that seems to have resisted modern logic, at least in some part of Asia, and in this case, the practice was used to fix and electrical problem in a Boeing 757. And it might sound like a strange way to fix a mechanical issue, but here’s what’s even stranger: it worked.
Still, the whole idea of sacrificing goats to appease the sky gods doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in skeptics like myself. Luckily, I don’t think I’ll be taking Nepal Airlines anytime soon.