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Quin Maltais’s four-hour flight from Toronto to Calgary, Canada, was in its final descent on Feb. 26 when she started to feel a strange sensation in her lower back, according toCBC News.
“I just kind of ignored it,” Maltais told the CBC, and mentioned she thought it might have been the air conditioning blowing on her.
“As soon as the lights turned off again, closer to when we’re literally about to land, I felt the piercing pain on my lower back, like, oh, my God, something bit me,” she said.
Maltais told the Canadian news outlet that she was trying to grab her sweater, but was virtually stuck in her seat because she couldn’t take off herseatbeltduring landing.
“The lights turned on, I looked into the ball of bundled sweater that I had but nothing was there. I looked behind me on the seat and then I saw movement and there was a scorpion that was in the fold toward the back of the chair.”
When the Yukon native, who was studying in Alberta, alerted aflight attendant, she said they first brushed it off after finding a gum wrapper in the seat, and thought that was what caused her to be uncomfortable.
Maltais claims she demanded she check the seat again and that’s when the attendant saw the scorpion.
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“I had a full-fledged panic attack,” she said.
“Although this is an extremely rare situation, it can unfortunately occur,” the spokesperson added. “Our teams followed the protocols in place and a complete inspection of the aircraft, as well as an extermination process, were carried.”
The unexpected presence of scorpions on planes is, surprisingly, a relatively regular occurrence. A United flight was delayed in May 2017 afterthe animal was found in a passenger’s clothing. A scorpionfell on someone’s headin April of that year. And in February 2019, a scorpioncrawled out of an overhead binon a Lion Air flight.
According to a description fromTerminix Pest Control, “All scorpions are venomous, but not always poisonous to humans.” In some species, however, it can be life-threatening. The animal can survive in a variety of environments from mountains to deserts to marshes — and seemingly, plane cabins — with little food or oxygen.
source: people.com
