Everything was normal for the passengers on a Quantas flight to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea today until a woman turned and looked out a window.
“There’s a snake on the wing….There’s its head and and if you look closely you can see a fraction of its body,” the woman told the crew as other passengers scoffed in disbelief.
But the woman was right, there was a “very uncomfortable” scrub python clinging for life to the wing of the plane, University of Sydney snake expert Rick Shine told The Sydney Morning Herald.
”There’s no way it could be anything else. They’re common in north Queensland. They’re ambush predators and if there are rodents anywhere nearby, they’ll most likely be in the vicinity. They often find their way into tight ceiling spaces in houses, although I’ve never heard of one on a plane until now,” Shine said.
As the plane reached cruising altitude and wind speed picked up the snake’s tale began to trash into the side of the plane’s engine. (
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Luckily for all on board the snake in question was not part of a nest of pythons like in Samuel L. Jackson’s 2006 Hollywood blockbuster but was instead a singular specimen who had crawled into the wrong place at the wrong time.
At first the snake seemed to have found a safe nook under the flap of the wing, passenger Robert Weber said, but then wind caught the snake’s tail exposing almost a foot of the reptile’s rear end.
”I felt quite sad for it, really. For the remainder of the flight, he was trying to pull himself back into the plane, even though he was fighting against 250 mph winds. The cabin crew told us that at cruising altitude, it was 10 degrees outside – but not even that was able to finish him,” Weber said.
The life and death struggle continued, with the pilots taking turns checking on the drama, until the python started to lose strength with the wind repeatedly thrashing its tail into the plane’s engine causing blood to spray all over the place.
”At that point, the pilot turned to us and said: ‘He should be dead,'” Weber said.
The snake’s fate wasn’t sealed until the plane touched down and it became clear that it wasn’t moving.
A Quantas spokeperson said, “We have never heard of this happening before.