A cobra snake under the pilot’s seat causes an emergency landing in South Africa

About 11,000 feet in the air, South African pilot Rudolf Erasmus noticed an extra passenger on the plane he was piloting.

And this passenger was not a human being, but a cobra snake hiding under the pilot’s seat in the cockpit.

Erasmus told the BBC: “To be honest, it seemed as if my mind wasn’t registering what was going on around me… It was a moment of […] the horror”.

The pilot added that at first he thought the cold-touch object on his back was a water bottle. “I felt something cold crawling up my shirt,” says Erasmus.

The pilot thought he hadn’t closed the water bottle tightly and that it had spilled on his shirt.

He adds, “When I turned to the left and looked down, I saw a cobra […] She leans her head back from under the seat.

Then the pilot decided to make an emergency landing on the plane, which was on its way to the capital, Pretoria, from Bloemfontein.

On board the private jet, a Beechcraft Barron 58, were four passengers in addition to the snake.

And the bite of the snake known as the “Raja’s Cape Cobra” can kill its victim within only 30 minutes.

The pilot did not want to cause the passengers to panic, so he thought carefully before telling them calmly that there was an extra and unwanted passenger on board.

And Erasmus was afraid that the snake would come out of the cockpit to where the passenger seats were, and it would frighten them all.

In the end, the pilot decided to tell the passengers, saying: “Listen. There is a snake on board. It is hiding under my seat. We will try to get to the ground as fast as we can.”

So how did the travelers react? About this, the pilot described a moment of complete silence that prevailed in the place until it was possible to “hear the sound of a needle hitting the ground. And I think everyone froze for a moment or two.”

Erasmus said pilots are trained for many scenarios, but of course not dealing with snakes in the cockpit. The pilot added to the BBC that the panic that prevailed in the place exacerbated the situation.

The plane had to make an emergency landing in Welkom, South Africa.

However, the presence of the snake on board the plane was not entirely surprising, despite the horror it caused. Two employees of the Worcester Flying Club – from where the plane took off at the beginning of the flight – said that they had seen a snake hiding under the plane the night it took off, and that they had tried to catch it, but to no avail.

Pilot Erasmus said he tried to find the snake before boarding the plane with passengers, but “unfortunately it was not found.” [الثعبان] There, we all thought he might have crawled away in the night or early morning which was Monday.”

Engineers searching the plane are trying to find the snake that has been hiding inside.

Pilot Erasmus was praised for his heroic role in protecting the lives of passengers on board. But Erasmus refused to be described as heroic, praising the passengers for keeping their calm.