Alaskan flight gets own ‘Snakes on a Plane’ incident

CORRECTS BYLINE NAME TO ANNA McCONNAUGHY- In this Sunday, March 19, 2017 photo, a flight attendant holds a snake found on a Ravn Alaska flight between Aniak, Alaska and Anchorage. The snake escaped from a passenger on a previous flight. The flight attendant captured the reptile and placed it in a trash bag and stowed it in an overhead luggage compartment. (Anna McConnaughy via AP)
By Hannah Edensor


For someone who was terrified just watching the film, Snakes on a Plane, this news was not well received.

Per AP, a plane headed to Alaska received an unexpected announcement that while a passenger on the previous flight, who had travelled with a pet snake, had disembarked, his snake had not.

Cue panic.

Per AP, passenger Anna McConnaughy said, “The pilot came, and said, ‘Guys, we have some loose snake on the plane, but we don’t know where it is’”. This is mid-flight, mind you.

But thankfully, it was A) not deadly and B) mostly just sleepy. So the hunt was on to find the snake.

A spokesman for the airline, William Walsh, said in a statement that the sneaky snake owner had in fact failed to register the pet for travel in the cabin, but reported his snake missing after disembarking the plane, suggesting it was probably still on the damn plane.

One of the passengers on board the Ravn Alaska flight travelling to Anchorage, a young boy, apparently spotted the snake and asked his mum “What’s that?”

“That’s how we figured out there was a snake sleeping in the corner,” McConnaughy told AP.

Shockingly, nobody panicked and one of the pilots came back to help a flight attendant catch him.

“He said, ‘I’ll hold the bag, and you grab the snake’,” McConnaughy said. “Quite a gentleman.”

The snake then spent the rest of the journey in an overhead storage bin, and the plane reached Anchorage on schedule. The cheeky bugger was up to 1.5 metres long.

The flight attendant then apparently grabbed the snake by the belly and dropped it into a plastic rubbish bag. Fearless, I tell ya!

Per William Walsh’s statement, the airline was thankful for the heads-up, but unimpressed at the incident, given it has specific requirements for carrying on reptiles, which instruct Ravn Alaska does not allow any large animal that’s not a dog to be used as a service animal.

Image: TIME

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