Snakes on a plane, no really...

Just when you thought it was safe to fly.

http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2006060122

Pilot gets unwanted guest on flight
By John McCoy

Staff writer When Monty Coles lifted his Piper Cherokee into the air for a leisurely Saturday flight over the West Virginia countryside, he didn’t know a blacksnake had stowed away inside the airplane’s instrument panel.

“As far as I was concerned, everything was fine,” said Coles, a 62-year-old private pilot from Cross Lanes. “I did a very cautious pre-flight check on the plane because it has a fairly new engine. I didn’t find a single thing out of order.”

As Coles prepared to land for gas in Gallipolis, Ohio, the 4 1/2-foot snake revealed itself. “I was about 10 miles out of Gallipolis, 3,000 feet off the ground, and I’d just finished scanning the instruments,” he said. “I looked up and saw the snake’s head sticking out of a hole in the instrument panel.”

At that moment, Coles said his thoughts flashed back to his flight training 25 years ago. “Nothing in any of the manuals ever described anything like this,” he deadpanned. But [instructor] Benny Mallory gave me the best advice I ever got — ‘No matter what happens, fly the plane.’ ”

As the snake poked its head farther outside the panel, Coles tried to whack it with a handheld radio. “Batteries went flying everywhere, and the snake dropped down out of the instrument panel and landed at my feet under the rudder pedals,” Coles said. “I tried to open my door and kick it out, but it shot across the cabin floor and climbed up the door on the other side.”

While maintaining control of the plane with one hand, Coles used his other hand to grab the snake just behind its head. “There was no way I was letting that thing go. It coiled all around my arm, and its tail grabbed hold of a lever on the floor and started pulling,” Coles said. “I think it was as scared as I was. After all, it had never flown before.”
With one hand on the steering yoke and the other wrestling the snake, the by-then-desperate pilot radioed ahead for help.

“I asked for priority clearance to land,” he said. “They came back and asked what my problem was. I told them I had one hand full of snake and the other hand full of plane. They cleared me in.”
Coles landed the plane one-handed.

“Some of my friends were there and saw the landing,” he said. “They told me I should fly with snakes more often, because that was the smoothest landing they’d ever seen me make.”

After posing for a few photos with the reptilian intruder, Coles released it into some nearby weeds.

“That snake resides in Ohio now,” he said. “I wasn’t about to bring it home. I don’t mind snakes, but I sure like to know where they are.”
Coles said that, in retrospect, he’s fortunate to have made the May 27 flight alone. “I usually fly with my wife or with my little wiener dog, Killer,” he said. “If my wife had been in the plane, I wouldn’t have a wife, a plane or myself. I don’t know what might have happened if Killer had been in the plane, but it sure would have been a lot more exciting.

You can't write movie scripts this good!

I had to.