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Python on plane wing captured on video

Python on plane wing: Passengers on a Qantas flight from Paupa New Guina to Cairns, Australia, videotaped a 10-foot python on the wing of their plane during a nearly two-hour flight.

  • By Staff Associated Press

| Sydney

This snake on a plane had a turbulent flight.

Stunned Qantas Airways passengers watched out their windows as a large python clung to a plane's wing during a nearly two-hour flight from Australia's northeastern city of Cairns to Papua New Guinea.

The 3-meter (10-foot) python fought to stay on the wing, pulling itself forward only to be pushed back by the frigid wind.

Passenger Robert Weber videotaped the struggle and told Australia's Fairfax Media that the wind whipping the snake against the side of the plane left a bloody smear.

The python managed to hang on until the plane landed in Port Moresby, but a Qantas spokesman said the creature was dead on arrival.

It was reminiscent of the 2006 Hollywood thriller "Snakes on a Plane."

In other pythons in Australia news, on Jan. 4, Australian mom Tess Guthrie rescued her 2-year-old daughter Zara from a six-foot python, reported The Christian Science Monitor.

Before dawn she heard her cat hissing ­– but thought it was normal, she told the Brisbane Times, because the cat had been acting up recently. But when she looked on the bed at where she put her daughter to sleep, she saw an odd form writhing around. 

Grabbing her mobile phone to shine some light on the bed, she saw the uninimaginable: curled around the arm of her daughter was a six-foot-long python, according to the Times.

Apparently, after the snake saw Ms. Guthrie, it began constricting around Zara’s arm and started to strike at her. Guthrie thought the python was going to kill her daughter, and maternal instinct took over.

“… on the third time [it was biting down on her] I grabbed the snake on the head. I pulled her and the snake apart from each other,” Guthrie told the newspaper. Then, she said, with her child in one arm, Guthrie whipped the snake across the room and dashed outside.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

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