Apart from the passengers, Rudolph Erasmus had no idea that the plane he was piloting also had a highly venomous snake on board. The reptile was right in the cockpit and forced it to crash-land earlier this week in the town of Welkom, South Africa.
The “feeling of cold rises through the T-shirtit wasn’t water, as he thought, it was actually a yellow snake that slid down his back and later found the animal under his seat. “To be honest, my brain wasn’t registering what was going on,” Rudolph Erasmus told the BBC in statements. “When I turned to the left and looked down, I saw the snake (…) retract its head behind the chair.”
The discovery by the South African pilot was made at an altitude of more than three thousand meters on the flight connecting Bloemfontein and Pretoria. On board the private plane a Beechcraft Baron 58, four passengers and of course the snake.
Erasmus’s life was in danger, because a bite from a Cape cobra (Naja nivea) can lead to the death of a person in 30 minutes, writes the British public broadcaster.
The pilot was still hesitant to tell the passengers about the snake’s unexpected visit for fear of causing panic, but in the end he did. “Listen. There’s a snake on the plane, under my seat, so let’s try to get down as quickly as possible,” Rudolph Erasmus calmly communicated.
Faced with this information, the reaction of the passengers was absolute silence. “You could hear a needle drop and I think everyone froze for a minute or two,” the pilot reported. who has been praised for his handling of the situation.
South Africa’s civil aviation commissioner, Poppy Khosa, stressed Erasmus’s “great ability” to deal with the situation. “It saved all the lives on board,” the official said, according to the News24 website. “It could have been disastrous,” Khosa admitted.
Despite the shock, the unexpected passenger’s presence wasn’t entirely a surprise, as officials at the Worcester Aviation Club, from which the plane took off, saw the snake trying to shelter under the plane. They tried to catch the reptile, but without success.
The pilot said he was still trying to find the snake on the plane before boarding the plane with the four passengers. “Unfortunately she wasn’t there, so we all assume she must have crept in at night or earlier that morning, which was Monday,” he recalls.
After all, ‘five’ passengers boarded and after the emergency landing the whereabouts of the snake remained unknown.
Source: DN
