Article: Copperhead in the cockpit: Snakes on a plane is a cool movie premise, but pilots say other critters pose bigger threat.

Byline: Dave Levinthal and Michael Grabell

Sep. 3--Soaring solo over Ohio in his single-engine Piper, Monty Coles noticed a little head poke out from inside his instrument panel.

Next thing he knew, a 4-foot-long rat snake shot out. He hit it with a radio, then grabbed its neck. Far from dead, the snake coiled around his arm. "When I saw that little head, I knew it was going to be a bad day. I had a fistful of snake and a fistful of plane," Mr. Coles said of the May incident. But close encounters with the slithering kind like Mr. Coles' almost never happen -- despite what a new Samuel L. Jackson movie, Snakes on a Plane, might have you believe. ...

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