And no, it’s not just Hollywood movie anymore. One pilot actually had a deadly Cobra slither under his shirt as he was flying the plane.
Thank goodness he held it together. I know if that was me, the plane would have been zig-zagging all over the sky as I jumped on the cockpit seats screaming.
NPR reported that Of all the things to go wrong midair in the cockpit of a plane, finding a venomous snake under the pilot's seat must surely be one of the worst scenarios.
So spare a thought for South African pilot Rudolf Erasmus.
"I felt this little cold sensation underneath my shirt where my hip is situated — but basically where you've got your little love handles," he tells NPR.
When he looked down, the pilot was surprised to see a highly venomous Cape cobra under his seat.
Erasmus felt the slithering stowaway as he was piloting a private flight from South Africa's Western Cape to the northeastern town of Nelspruit on Monday.
"As I turned to my left and looked down, I could see the head of the snake receding back underneath my seat," he says. "At which point there was a moment of stunned silence, to be brutally honest."
Erasmus decided to turn the light aircraft around and make an emergency landing at the closest airport of Welkom.
"I then informed my passengers of what was going on... but everybody remained calm," he recounted.
The kicker in all of this is that one bite from that Cape Cobra can kill person in one hour.
Here’s a video on this amazing and very deadly creature:
That pilot is amazing. He’s the guy you definitely want flying you from point A to point B. Very cool under pressure.
