Dubai-based airline Emirates said on Monday that one of its flights from Muscat, Oman, to Dubai was cancelled the previous day after a snake was spotted slithering in the cargo hold. Passengers hadn’t yet boarded the Boeing 777.
Baggage handlers found the animal on the Emirates aircraft, which was due to head to Muscat. In statement reported by AFP, the airline conducted a full search through the plane before returning it to service.
Emirates did not specify the species of snake, nor whether it was potentially dangerous.
Comparisons with the 2006 Samuel L Jackson thriller Snakes on a Plane, which sees passengers battle hundreds of highly poisonous snakes in mid-flight, inevitably emerged on social media.
This wasn’t the first time a snake has been found on a plane in real life—and not just on the big screen in the Hollywood thriller Snakes on a Plane, in which a crate of serpents was released onboard a flight. A snake recently sparked panic among Aeromexico’s first-class passengers in November after it fell from an overhead storage compartment.
