Stunned Qantas Airways passengers looked out of their windows as a large python clung to their plane’s wing during a flight from Australia’s northeastern city of Cairns to Papua New Guinea.

The three-metre-long scrub python fought to stay on the wing, pulling itself forward only to be pushed back by the frigid wind. Its body was repeatedly struck against the plane’s engine, with blood staining the white paint.

It managed to hang on until the plane landed in Port Moresby, nearly two hours later, but ground crew found it to be dead on arrival.

One passenger, Robert Weber, a website designer in Cairns, told the Sydney Morning Herald that his fellow travellers avoided the hysteria shown in Samuel L. Jackson film Snakes On A Plane.

“The people at the front were oblivious to what was going on but the passengers at the back were all totally focused on the snake and how it might have got on to the aircraft,” he said.

“There was no panic. At no time did anyone stop to consider that there might be others on board.”

The president of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, Paul Cousins, said: “It appears as though the snake has initially crawled up inside the landing bay, maybe housed himself in there and then crawled into the trailing ledge flap assembly.”