As if people who are afraid of flying need something else to be worried about: There was, in fact, a snake on a plane.
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On Monday, a passenger found a snake under their seat after a plane landed at Newark Airport in New Jersey, according to CNN.
“Passengers in business class started shrieking and pulling their feet up” someone who was on the plane told CNN affiliate News 12 The Bronx.
The plane was traveling from Tampa to Newark on United. Staff on the plane were “alerted by passengers,” and then asked for assistance with the issue, the airline told CNN.
Police arrived at the gate to remove the snake which the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey told the outlet was of the garden variety — fitting that it was found in the Garden State.
In 2006, Samuel L. Jackson starred in the action thriller “Snakes on a Plane,” where passengers on an airplane were contending with vicious, violent snakes at the behest of a crime leader who did not want a witness onboard to testify about his crimes. Scores of people die in the cult classic.
It has a 69% Rotten Tomatoes score and received a positive review in the New York Times the year it was released.
“All anyone really needs to know about this amusingly crude, honestly satisfying artifact is snakes + plane + Samuel L. Jackson,” the outlet wrote.
Shockingly, this has actually happened before. In February, passengers on a flight from Malaysia faced a snake of uncertain provenance that somehow managed to get behind the overhead lights and went viral on TikTok, per USA Today.
Venomous snakes are not allowed on planes, but you can sometimes travel with non-poisonous ones as pets.