Soaring in popularity

Mark Essig was settling into his puddle-jumper flight from Charlotte to Asheville, N.C., on Monday when he noticed an unusual passenger boarding the plane.

It was a duck. Making his way down the aisle.

Wearing red shoes. And a Captain America diaper.

The duck’s human introduced him to their fellow, now-amused passengers: This was Daniel Turducken Stinkerbutt, or Daniel for short.

He is a 4½-year-old Indian Runner duck and is her emotional support animal, she explained.

“I heard a few maybe semi-critical mutterings, like, ‘Now I’ve seen everything,’ ” Essig told The Washington Post. “But most everybody was delighted to have a duck on a plane. As they should be.”

Like many other passengers, Essig snapped a few photos while Daniel and his human were boarding. After takeoff, Essig tried to concentrate on light reading during the flight, but he kept inadvertently glancing toward the duck, just a row ahead and to the right of him.

When he saw the duck staring out the window, he couldn’t resist taking one more picture.

After the flight, Essig posted his photos on Twitter.

“My seatmate, [from] CLT [to] AVL, is this handsome duck named Daniel,” Essig tweeted first. “His gentle quacking eases the sadness of leaving #SFA16,” the Southern Foodways Alliance conference in Mississippi.

“I was expecting that this might amuse a couple of my friends,” he said. What he didn’t anticipate was that the photos would go viral.

It turned out that a duck wearing shoes and a diaper on a plane was too much for the internet to handle.

Essig posted two more photos and a video. Both tweets were shared thousands of times. The most popular one, however, was a picture of Daniel as the duck seemed to stare forlornly out the airplane window: “Daniel, the duck on my flight, likes to look at the clouds,” Essig stated simply. That photo had more than 5,000 retweets and more than 11,000 likes.

Within two days of Essig’s tweets, Daniel had become an internet sensation, getting featured on BuzzFeed, ABC News and Cosmopolitan, among many other sites.

The attention surprised Daniel’s owner, Carla Fitzgerald of Wisconsin, “because to me, having an emotional support duck is normal – it’s my new normal.”

Fitzgerald adopted Daniel in 2012, when he was two days old. Less than a year later, Fitzgerald, a former horse-and-carriage driver in Milwaukee, was involved in a serious accident. Her horse was badly injured, and the crash sent Fitzgerald hurtling toward a metal-grated drawbridge. For months, she was immobile.

“It took them four months to teach me how to walk again,” Fitzgerald said. Along with the physical pain, she suffered post-traumatic stress disorder.

Since the accident, Daniel has accompanied Fitzgerald everywhere, mostly car rides. Monday had been Daniel’s first time flying on a plane (or flying, period). She provided a note to the airline from her doctor, who has said it is in Fitzgerald’s best interest to have Daniel around for support, but otherwise had a smooth trip. The crew on their first leg, before their connecting flight to Asheville, even insisted on posing for pictures with Daniel and presenting him with a “Certificate of First Flight.”

The Transportation Department is debating new rules regarding accommodations for disabled people on airplanes, including reviewing rules for emotional-support animals, USA Today reported. The department began allowing emotional-support animals on planes, but it has offended some passengers.

“Here’s the thing. Who are we to say what is and what isn’t an emotional support animal or what can and cannot be a pet?” Fitzgerald said. “Or what they can do for people who have PTSD like I do? Having it is hell.”

Daniel apparently enjoys movies, but only “super G-rated” ones. (Daniel responded well to “The Peanuts Movie” but got upset during a chase scene in “The Good Dinosaur,” Fitzgerald said.)

“He doesn’t identify with other ducks because he’s imprinted on humans,” Fitzgerald said. “As far as he’s concerned, he thinks he’s people with feathers.”