Staff found the 20-centimeter (8-inch) Mandarin rat snake in the passenger cabin near the door late Sunday before passengers were due to board the flight bound for Tokyo from Sydney International Airport, Qantas said in a statement Monday.
Australia's flagship airline said passengers were given hotel rooms
and left Sydney on a replacement plane Monday morning. Qantas said the
original jet would be fumigated before returning to service in case
there were other snakes on board.
The snake was taken by quarantine officials for analysis.
The Agriculture Department
said the snake, a species that grows to an average 1.2 meters (4 feet),
had been euthanized, "as exotic reptiles of this kind can harbor pests
and diseases not present in Australia."
The department said the snake had arrived aboard the jet in a flight a day earlier from Singapore.
"The Department of Agriculture is looking into how the snake came to
be on the plane, but isn't able to speculate at this time," it said in a
statement.
The mildly venomous Asian snake was about the width of a pencil and
did not pose a threat to humans, but it had the potential to cause
ecological havoc in the Australian environment if it had escaped the
plane with a mate, Canberra Reptile Zoo herpetologist Peter Child said.
While snakes rarely pose aviation hazards, a 3-meter (10-foot) python
in January clung to the wing of a Qantas flight from northeast
Australia to Papua New Guinea. The python died during the flight but was
still attached to the wing when the two-hour flight ended.
Source: Yahoo News
No comments:
Post a Comment