INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES (Sydney, Australia) 24 September 13 Real Life ‘Snakes on a Plane’ Freak 370 Qantas Airline Jet Passengers (Esther Tanquintic-Misa)
Good thing Qantas Airways staff discovered the 20-centimeter (8-inch) snake way even before passengers boarded its plane bound for Tokyo. Otherwise it would have been chaos equivalent to the 2006 American action thriller film 'Snakes on a Plane.' Imagine combining aerophobia, the fear of flying, and ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes.
The Mandarin Rat snake, a nonvenomous colubrid snake endemic to Asia, was found in the passenger cabin near the door late on Sunday at the Sydney International Airport.
Officials from the airline as well as from the Australian Agriculture Department remain uncertain as to how the snake writhed its way into the aircraft. However, they surmised it may have come from Singapore, where the jet had been in the days prior.
"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 Qantas Boeing 747 airliner, since arriving in Sydney from Singapore on Saturday, was just on an airport tarmac.
The Australian Agriculture Department initially quarantined the reptile and then later killed it because it could be carrying diseases not native to Australia.
"Exotic reptiles of this kind can harbor pests and diseases not present in Australia," the Australian Agriculture Department said in a statement.
The 370 affected Qantas Airline passengers were accommodated in hotels overnight. They all left Sydney on Monday morning on a replacement plane.
This is not the first time that Qantas got embroiled with a flying snake passenger.
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/508357/20130924/snakes-plane-qantas-airline-jet-singapore.htm

LIVE SCIENCE (Ogden, Utah) 24 September 13 Snake On a Plane Grounds Australian Flight (Douglas Main)
A small pencil-sized snake caused more than enough trouble to write home about Sunday night (Sept. 22), when it was found just inside the doorway of a Tokyo-bound Boeing 747-400 in Sydney's airport, according to news reports. The snake, which measured 8 inches (20 centimeters) long, was identified as a Mandarin ratsnake, an Asian species that is non-venomous, Agence France-Presse reported.
Quite a rattling over a little snake, it would seem; hundreds of passengers had to wait until the next day to fly.
But we may forgive Australians for being a little cautious when it comes to snakes — the country is home to 20 of the world's 25 most venomous species, AFP noted. The airline, Qantas, had another snake incident in January when a python was sighted crawling on the wing mid-flight. "The python had been tucked into the plane's wing before takeoff, and amazed passengers watched from the window as it engaged in a life-or-death struggle to maintain its grip in fierce winds and zero temperatures," AFP reported. When the flight landed, the snake was dead.
http://www.livescience.com/39893-snake-on-a-plane-grounds-flight.html