Real-life ‘Snakes on a Plane’: Snake catcher called to capture stowaway reptile

Passengers on a Melbourne - Brisbane flight were stranded on the tarmac while a professional snake catcher was brought in to capture a stowaway.

Staff spotted the snake while passengers were boarding the Virgin Australia Flight VA337 last week. It was not immediately clear what type of snake it was and snake catcher Mark Pelley revealed that he had initially believed that it might be venomous.

Australia is home to most of the world’s most venomous snakes, making Pelley’s choice of a work a particularly dangerous one. After capturing the two-foot snake Pelley was able to establish that it was in fact a green tree snake, a non-venomous species.

But speaking to CBS News, he revealed that he had been worried when trying to identify the snake. Pelley revealed: “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.”

“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.”

“But thankfully, I got it on the first try and captured it,” Pelley continued. “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.”

What could have been a major incident only resulted in a delay of around two hours for passengers. The snake is native to the Brisbane region so it seems likely that the snake was accidentally brought aboard in a passenger’s luggage.

Nevertheless, the snake could not be returned safely to the wild and so it was handed to a local veterinarian to be housed with a licensed snake keeper.

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