Qantas: Rats on a Plane!

Qantas grounded a Brisbane-bound flight from Sydney Wednesday evening after flight attendants discovered five stowaway rats awaiting liftoff in the plane's emergency medical equipment, cuddling up with a defibrillator,MSNBC reports. 

Qantas said that it did not know how the rats got there, but that Sydney Airport staff had killed them.

Engineers inspected the Boeing 767 for any damage, specifically for gnawed wiring. The plane was expected to be back in service again.

The vermin news comes on the heels of Wednesday's public relations fiasco for Qantas, which was forced to divert a flight on the airline's new nonstop Brisbane to Dallas route to the tiny Pacific Island nation of New Caledonia, calling into question the feasibility of the much-publicized new flightpath.

A series of mishaps had already made this an eventful year for Qantas: In January a Sydney to Los Angeles flight was diverted to Fiji due to an engine problem. A week later, a flight from Adelaide to Melbourne lost pressure and dropped 26,000 feet, leaving passengers gasping

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