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Qantas Are Whacking Their Snakes Again

Qantas’ new engineer successfully clears another plane. The BFD. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.

Americans seem to live in perpetual terror of Australia’s wildlife: snakes, spiders, cassowaries. But it’s as if the good ol’ US of A hasn’t got its own share of nasty critters: bears, gators, school shooters, Kamala Harris. Not to mention rattlesnakes.

In particular: rattlesnakes on planes.

Qantas engineers maintaining the airline’s grounded Airbus A380 fleet in a Californian desert are facing a novel problem: rattlesnakes are making homes in the landing gear.

I wonder, do rattlesnakes have conversations about how they had to live, 150 of them, in a wheel arch for a year – and pay t’airline for privilege?

The airline moved its superjumbo fleet to Victorville, in the Mojave Desert, for deep storage last year, due to the downturn in air travel and the suspension of its international routes.

The location’s dry heat and low humidity makes it ideal for storing aircraft, but it’s also an ideal environment for highly venomous rattlesnakes and scorpions. The nasty critters are setting up home around the grounded planes’ tyres and landing gear.

As a result, Qantas engineers have had to start using a “wheel whacker” to try and scare off the animals before carrying out inspections.

Sorry, but that’s nowhere near Aussie enough. A real Aussie wheel whacker ought to involve belting the living daylights out of the buggers.

Still, it’s an improvement on the usual sort of whacking indulged by the World’s Wokest Airline.

Qantas’s Los Angeles-based engineering manager, Tim Heywood told the airline’s Roo Tales blog that[…]

“The first thing we do before we unwrap and start any ground inspections of the landing gear in particular is to walk around the aircraft stomping our feet and tapping the wheels with a wheel whacker to wake up and scare off the snakes. That’s about making sure no harm comes to our engineers or the snakes.

“Only then do we carefully approach each wheel and unwrap them before performing our pressure checks and visual inspections.”

“We’ve encountered a few rattle snakes and also some scorpions, but the wheel whacker does its job and they scuttle off.

Just as well they didn’t ground the planes in Florida. Imagine having to shoo off a family of tweakers with alligators and AR-15s. Or, more likely, the whole fleet gets turned into flying meth labs.

Speaking of flying drug labs…

Qantas has also announced an incentive program for passengers to get vaccinated, which the airline sees as the key to restarting international travel, including giving away free flights for a year.

Traveller

Yeah, thanks, but no thanks, Alan Joyce. I’d as soon take my chances with those monkey-fighting snakes on those Monday through Friday planes.

Qantas’s new engineer successfully clears another plane. The BFD. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.

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