A snake forced a pilot in Australia to call mayday and return to the airport, when it appeared from behind the dashboard to slither around his legs, in a scene that could have come out of Hollywood’s 2006 thriller Snakes on a Plane.
Twenty minutes into a solo cargo flight of Air Frontier from Darwin, in northern Australia, to a remote outpost in the country on Tuesday, pilot Braden Blennerhassett, noticed the snake peering between his instrument panel and the dashboard of the twin-engine Beechcraft Baron G-58 he was flying.
Blennerhasett told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the ground crew hardly believed him when he radioed in to say he was returning because of a snake on the plane, but once he called for a snake handler to meet them on the ground, he was taken seriously.
The planed landed safely while the snake crawled around Blennerhasett’s leg. According to the Guardian, a firefighter came on board shortly after the landing and spotted the snake but no one had been able to catch it by Thursday, so the plane was kept grounded.
