Hollywood lore has it that the pitch for the 2006 film Snakes on a Plane comprised just four words: snakes on a plane. The quirky combination was irresistible to the producer, and star Samuel L Jackson, even if the film itself failed to trouble the Academy Awards judging panel.
In real life, snakes on a plane are not as unusual as you might think. The Australian airline Qantas has had two incidents this year, with a flight from Sydney to Tokyo delayed just last week after a Mandarin rat snake was discovered to have hitched a lift during an earlier stopover in Asia.
Meanwhile, there were reports over the weekend that two British pilots with an unnamed airline were both asleep at the same time, leaving their Airbus A330 to fly entirely on autopilot.
Of course, there is no suggestion that either of these incidents posed an immediate threat to passengers – Mandarin rat snakes are not venomous and the autopilot is often engaged during normal flight – nor, indeed, that they were in any way connected.
However, if there were snakes on every plane, it would certainly reduce the risk of the pilots falling asleep.
