Snake on a Plane!
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Spring 2024
An Allegiant Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Orlando was diverted to Birmingham, Alabama, after multiple passengers reported a massive creature on one of the Airbus A320’s wings.
“It was like a snake, a big blue snake,” one passenger was quoted as saying, “but a monster snake. It was at least twenty-five feet long. Longer than any snake I’ve seen that wasn’t in a movie. And it had yellow spikes on its body like some kind of dinosaur.”
Both the pilot and the co-pilot confirmed that the FMS (Flight Management System) in the cockpit raised an alarm just after the plane entered Birmingham airspace that the craft’s center of gravity had shifted dramatically, but no one on board Flight G4 1 needed a technical system to determine that something weighed down the plane on the port side. Passengers reported a sudden dip to the left, which was when the first passengers spotted the enormous reptile on the wing. Flight attendants hurried to calm panic-stricken passengers, some of whom began to scream and shout in fear.
“At 35,000 feet,” a passenger who identified himself only as Stephen, a former employee of Allegiant Airlines, said, “nothing can survive out there. It should freeze, suffocate, and be ripped off the wing by 500-mile-per-hour winds. I’m not sure what these people think they saw, but it was not a gigantic snake.”
Just the same, the craft’s pilot radioed Birmingham and requested an emergency landing. Once the aircraft’s landing gear came down, however, passengers watching the snake slither the length of the wing reported that the creature simply disappeared. The plane put down in Birmingham without incident, all passengers disembarked, and ground technicians reported no indication that the wing had suffered any damage.
All 176 passengers aboard were put on different flights bound for Orlando, Only one passenger, a young woman, opted out of continuing the journey, telling the airline and local TV reporters, “I’m good here. I have no idea why there was a sky snake of some sort on the wing—I could see it, just like everybody else—but you know what? I wanted to come to Birmingham anyway, I have family here, so this all works out okay for me.*”
When asked by one reporter why she called the mysterious creature a “sky snake,” the young woman hesitated. “Well, you know, a snake in the sky. I mean, what else would you call it?”
*Keeping Tabs Weekly Editor’s Note: Indeed, it does work out for that young lady! Our research shows that the average cost of a flight from Las Vegas to Orlando is $92. By comparison, a flight from Las Vegas to Birmingham costs in excess of $400. Good for her!
