One South African pilot had a real-life experience with a snake on an aircraft.
Pilot Rudolph Erasmus had to do with 11,000 feet in the air when he saw he wasn’t alone in the cockpit — there was a cobra under his seat.
“To be truly honest, it’s as if my brain did not register what was going on,” Erasmus informed the BBC.
How did the South African pilot learn about the cobra snake in the airplane?
He was carrying 4 guests from Bloemfontein to Pretoria. Shortly after the discovery, Erasmus made an emergency situation landing — “a bite from a Cape cobra is lethal and can kill someone in just 30 minutes,” BBC reported.
He notified the guests about the snake, and “everybody remained calm,” he informed NPR.
What made him observe the snake was that it crawled down his t-shirt midflight, per CNN.
South African civil air travel commissioner Poppy Khoza applauded Erasmus, calling him a “hero” due to the fact that he “saved all lives on board,” NPR reported.
The snake was not seen once again after being identified in the airplane, even after engineers removed the airplane to search for it, per BBC.
