A poisonous snake was discovered slithering in the cockpit of a plane by South African pilot Rudolph Erasmus at 11,000 feet in the air. The terrifying co-passenger was creeping beneath the pilot’s seat. “To be truly honest, it’s as if my brain did not register what was going on. It was a moment of […] awe,” Erasmus recalled, explaining that he initially mistook the cool sensation on his back for a water bottle.
“I felt this cool sensation, sort of, crawling up my shirt,” he explained, believing that he had not fully closed the container and hence the water was dripping down his back.
“As I turned to the left and looked down I saw the cobra […] receding its head backwards underneath the seat,” he said. The pilot was forced to land in an emergency. The flight had taken off from Bloemfontein and was bound for Pretoria. Together with the snake, the private jet, a Beechcraft Baron 58, carried four people.
Erasmus stated that a single bite from a Cape cobra can kill the victim in 30 minutes, thus to avoid any panic, he carefully considered before informing passengers calmly about the undesired co-passenger on board.
Pilot deliberates before Informing passengers of the Snake in the cockpit during the flight
Erasmus was also “so afraid the snake would go to the back and spark general pandemonium.” He deliberated long and hard before informing the passengers.
“I did inform the passengers: ‘Listen the snake is inside the aircraft, it’s underneath my seat, so let’s try and get down to the ground as soon as we can’,” he said to the passengers.
Erasmus described the terrifying revelation made to the passengers as “an absolute moment of silence”: “You could hear a needle drop and I think everyone froze for a moment or two,” he said.
Pilots are trained to deal with a variety of eventualities, but not with snakes in the cockpit, according to Erasmus, who added that panicking would have made the situation much worse.
The plane made an emergency landing in the town of Welkom. The existence of a snake, on the other hand, was not entirely unexpected. Two personnel at the Worcester flying club, from which the plane took off, stated they saw the lizard enter the plane and tried in vain to “grab” it.
Erasmus stated that he and the passengers tried to find the snake before boarding the plane, but “unfortunately it was not there, so we all then safely assumed that it must have crawled out overnight or earlier that morning, which was on Monday”.