By Gregory Wallace and Catherine Nicholls, CNN
South African authorities are praising a pilot’s guts for securely landing an airplane after feeling a poisonous stowaway cobra wriggling on his body mid-flight.
The pilot, Rudolf Erasmus, informed CNN he was piloting a little airplane on Monday with 4 associates aboard when he felt a “cold sensation … underneath my shirt at my hip area.”
“At first, I thought it was my water bottle leaking,” Erasmus said. “As I then turned to my left and I looked down, I saw the head of the snake receding back underneath my seat.”
“I had a moment of stunned silence,” he said. “It was more as if my brain did not register what is going on to be truly honest. It was a moment of disbelief, I think.”
Before leaving on the very first part of the day’s multileg journey, Erasmus said he had actually spoken with individuals at the airport “that they saw this cape cobra that was seeking refuge underneath our wing of the aircraft and had a suspicion that it crawled into the engine cowling.”
A search of the airplane showed up absolutely nothing, “so we assumed the snake had gotten out and went on his merry way,” he said.
‘A bit of a situation’
But the snake was obviously in hiding and emerged mid-flight.
The pilot informed the guests, notified air traffic controllers he had “a bit of a situation,” and landed the airplane close by. All 5 individuals onboard emerged unharmed, and the snake was discovered under the pilot’s seat “in a nice pretty little bundle,” Erasmus said.
The snake was a big cape cobra, according to the South African Civil Aviation Authority, which praised Erasmus “for displaying impeccable bravery after landing his aircraft incident-free, albeit under extreme pressure.”
“He remained calm in the face of a dangerous situation and managed to land the aircraft safely without any harm to him or his fellow passengers on board, displaying to the world that he is an aviation safety ambassador of the highest order,” Poppy Khoza, the air travel authority director, said in a declaration on Friday.
Cobra shows evasive once again
Cape cobras have a poisonous bite, and the grownups can reach more than 5 feet long, according to the South African National Biodiversity Institute.
Local snake catchers were contacted us to the airplane after landing, however Erasmus said the snake had actually vanished. He and some engineers invested the next 2 days pulling the airplane apart, looking for the snake.
“They took out the seats, the carpets, the panels — basically everything in the aircraft that they could strip at that point, they did,” he said. “But once again, unfortunately with no success.”
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