The crawling crawler, which turned out to be a harmless garter snake, appeared on Flight 2038 from Tampa shortly after landing Monday afternoon at Newark Liberty International Airport, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
One passenger told local channel News 12 New Jersey that as the plane moved from the runway to the gate, business class passengers started screaming and lifting their feet off the ground.
Port Authority spokeswoman Cheryl Ann Albiz said in an email Tuesday that airport animal control officials and personnel of the authority’s police were waiting for the plane at the gate and took away the snake, which was later released into the wild.
She added that there were no injuries and the incident did not affect the airport’s operations, and the plane left Newark at a later time.
None of the parties involved indicated how the snake boarded a commercial airliner.
But it certainly reminded some passengers of the 2006 thriller Snakes on a Plane, a fictional story about criminals unleashing dozens of venomous snakes onto a passenger plane in an attempt to kill a murder witness.
The incident was not the first realistic example of a snake on a commercial airliner, as a large snake was found slipping through the passenger cabin on an Aero Mexico flight to Mexico City in 2016. A snake was also seen clinging to the wing of a plane on a flight from Australia to Papua Guinea. new in 2013.
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