A flight in Australia was delayed for around two hours after a snake was found inside the aircraft’s cargo hold.
The reptile was discovered on Tuesday as passengers were boarding Virgin Australia Flight VA337 from Melbourne to Brisbane.
It turned out to be a 2ft Dendrelaphis punctulatus, a harmless, slender snake in the family Colubridae.
But snake catcher Mark Pelly, who has more than 16,000 Instagram followers, worried it was venomous when he approached it in Boeing 737’s hold.
He said: “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.”
When Mr Pelley entered the jet, the snake was hidden behind a panel and could have disappeared deeper into the plane.
Mr Pelley said he told an engineer and airline staff that they would have to evacuate the plane if the snake went missing.
“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,” Mr Pelley said.
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“But thankfully, I got it on the first try and captured it,” Mr Pelley added. “If I didn’t get it that first time, the engineers and I would be pulling apart a 737 looking for a snake still right now.”
Because the snake is native to Brisbane, Mr Pelley suspects it came aboard inside a passenger’s luggage on its way to Melbourne.
"It's actually very uncommon for snakes to be on the plane," Mr Pelley told Sky News.
However, for quarantine reasons, the snake cannot be returned to the wild, so it has been handed to a veterinarian to find a home with a licensed keeper.
