Unless you’ve never been on a plane before, flying isn’t exactly fun. So if someone wants to bring a well-behaved dog or cat with them, I say go for it. They’re cute and cuddly, and they’re usually better behaved than a lot of children. A snake on a plane, though? That’s going to be a no from most people, including the folks on a Virgin Atlantic flight, who the Associated Press reports recently dealt with a multi-hour delay while it was removed. And yes, before you ask, the plane was in Australia, because of course it was.
Thankfully, this time around, the snake in question wasn’t actually in the cabin, so that’s nice. Instead, it was in the cargo hold, where it could have easily snuck into someone’s luggage and given them a heck of a surprise when they got home. In fact, according to snake catcher Mark Pelley, the guy they brought in to wrangle the snake, there’s a good chance the snake actually got onto the plane in someone’s luggage and escaped during its flight from Brisbane to Melbourne.
The other good news, aside from the fact that he got it, and the flight was only delayed for two hours, is that it was reportedly a green tree snake that’s nonvenomous. That doesn’t mean it didn’t look scary at first, though, especially in a country that’s home to many of the most venomous snakes in the world. “It wasn’t until after I caught the snake that I realized that it wasn’t venomous. Until that point, it looked very dangerous to me,” Pelley told the AP.
Nope, nope, nope
Nonvenomous snakes can still bite you since they have mouths with teeth in them, but even a bite that draws a small amount of blood is much less of a concern than a strike from a venomous snake. But while no one was in any serious danger from the two-foot-long green snake, it still threatened to completely derail people’s travel plans, a fate that can sometimes feel worse than death.
That’s because there was a good chance it might slip out of the cargo hold and into the interior of the plane. And if that happened, they would have had to ground the plane until they could find it. Remember, until they got a closer look at it, they had no idea whether it was venomous or not.
“I said to them if I don’t get this in one shot, it’s going to sneak through the panels and you’re going to have to evacuate the plane because at that stage I did not know what kind of snake it was,” Pelley told the AP. “But thankfully, I got it on the first try and captured it. If I didn’t get it that first time, the engineers and I would be pulling apart a (Boeing) 737 looking for a snake still right now.”
While the snake can’t be released back into the wild, don’t worry. It’ll be fine. Authorities have reportedly given it to a veterinarian in Melbourne to care for while they try to find a home for it with a licensed snake keeper.
Snakes on planes
This certainly isn’t the first time a snake has gotten loose on a plane. Back in 2022, a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Tawau had to make an emergency landing after a passenger noticed a snake slithering through a light fixture. In a much more terrifying example, in 2023, the pilot of a small Beechcraft flying from Worcester to Mbombela in South Africa found a Cape cobra in the cockpit of his plane. He managed to land safely, but he also got lucky because the Cape cobra is one of the deadliest snakes in Africa.
Snakes don’t always sneak onto planes by themselves, either. Sometimes, humans try to bring them on board intentionally, sometimes in an attempt to smuggle them into other countries and sometimes just because. In 2023, the Transportation Security Administration had to stop one Florida woman from bringing her four-foot-long boa constrictor on a flight as her emotional support animal. Despite its emotional support status, the TSA made sure to point out that most airlines won’t let you bring a snake on the plane at all, and the ones that do require it to ride in the cargo hold.
So if you want to travel with your snake but don’t want to put it in cargo, you’re just gonna have to fly private. Or, you know, find someone else to take care of your snake while you’re gone, like a normal person. That’s also always an option.
