• A Virgin Australia flight was delayed by two hours due to a snake found in the cargo hold.
• The snake was identified as a non-venomous green tree snake.
• It is suspected that the snake sneaked onboard inside a passenger's luggage.
• Due to quarantine laws, the snake cannot be returned to the wild.
• This incident is not the first of its kind on Australian flights.

A domestic Virgin Australia flight, VA337, faced a two-hour delay on Tuesday after a 60-centimeter (2-foot) green tree snake was discovered in the cargo hold at Melbourne Airport. The snake was found during passenger boarding, causing considerable concern among the crew and passengers. Snake catcher Mark Pelley, who was called to the scene, initially thought the snake was venomous until he captured it. "It wasn’t until after I caught the snake that I realized that it wasn’t venomous. Until that point, it looked very dangerous to me," he stated, highlighting the tension of the situation, according to India Times, CBS News, and HuffPost.

Pelley discovered that the snake was partially hidden behind a panel in the dimly lit cargo hold and warned that if it managed to escape further into the plane, a full evacuation might be necessary. "I said to them if I don’t get this in one shot, it’s going to sneak through the panels and you’re going to have to evacuate the plane," he explained. Ultimately, he successfully captured the snake on his first attempt, which avoided a potentially more complicated situation, according to India Times, CBS News, and HuffPost.

The snake, thought to have slipped into the aircraft possibly via a passenger's luggage, will not be released back into the wild due to strict quarantine regulations in Australia. Instead, it has been handed over to a veterinarian in Melbourne, where it will be placed with a licensed snake keeper. This incident underscores the peculiar challenges travelers and airline staff occasionally face, as Pelley noted that without immediate action, "the engineers and I would be pulling apart a (Boeing) 737 looking for a snake still right now," as highlighted by India Times, CBS News, and HuffPost.