Snake Stuck on Plane Wing

gatagato · #11 ● 01-12-2013, 04:05 AM

Python indeed: too bad it was found dead

Python on a Plane

A Qantas Airlines plane turned into a real-life Samuel L. Jackson film when a python was spotted grasping for dear life on its wing.

The 10-foot scrub python held on to the plane’s wing for the entire 1 hour and 50 minute flight from Cairns, Australia to Port Moresby in Papua, New Guinea, the BBC said. The snake died by the time the plane had landed.

Passengers first spotted the snake 20 minutes after takeoff when a woman alerted other travelers and the airline crew. At first, only the python’s head was visible, but it was in clear sight while struggling to adhere to the plane in motion, as onlookers watched in horror.

''The people at the front were oblivious to what was going on but the passengers at the back were all totally focused on the snake and how it might have got on to the aircraft,” Robert Weber of Cairns, a passenger aboard the flight, told the Sydney Morning Herald. ''There was no panic. At no time did anyone stop to consider that there might be others on board.''

''It appears as though the snake has initially crawled up inside the landing bay, maybe housed himself in there, and then crawled into the trailing ledge flap assembly,” president of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, Paul Cousins, said.

The snake was found dead when the flight landed, having splattered blood on the plane’s white surface.

Last year, a similar incident happened on an Air Frontier flight in Australia when a pilot, Braden Blennerhassett, was forced to make an emergency landing after spotting a snake in the cockpit on a flight from Darwin to Peppimenarti.

(Photo: Reuters)

A python lies wedged on the wing of a Qantas passenger plane as it flies over Port Moresby January 10, 2013 in this handout picture. Passengers on a flight from Australia to Papua New Guinea were shocked to look out their cabin windows to find a huge snake on the wing of the plane. The three metre-long (9.1 foot) non-poisonous Amethystine python appeared about an hour into the Qantas flight between Cairns in northern Queensland and the Papua New Guinean capital of Port Moresby on Thursday.