(Newswire.net — April 15, 2017) — Richard Bell, who was returning home from a vacation with his wife and travelling from Houston, Texas to Calgary, Canada, said that he was eating lunch in his business class seat, when the venomous creature fell down on his head.
“My husband felt something in his hair. He grabbed it out of his hair and it fell onto his dinner table. As he was grabbing it by the tail it stung him,” Bell’s wife Linda told CNN and added that a nearby passenger cried, “Oh my god, that’s a scorpion.”
Richard threw the scorpion on the floor, and a flight attendant quickly covered it with a glass and threw it down the airplane toilet
A nurse, who also happened to be on the same United Airlines flight, gave him a Benadryl pill as a precautionary measure, in case he was allergic to scorpion stings.
When the plane landed in Calgary, Bell was taken to the hospital, but was quickly dismissed after being cleared of any medical issue.
Bell’s wife said that he doesn’t want to initiate a lawsuit, and United Airlines reached out to her husband to apologize and to offer him and his wife a fee as compensation.
Nobody knows how this venomous creature got into the plane. The airplane has flown to Houston earlier in the day from Costa Rica, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking platform.
Otherwise, this is not the first time that a scorpion has appeared on a plane. Such incidents are rare but not unheard of.
In 2015, on an Alaska Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, a scorpion reportedly stung a woman.
Interestingly, this latest incident occurred on the same day when a passenger was dragged off a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville on Sunday, April 13.
The flight 3411 was overbooked and the company’s staff was required to find seats for four crew members. They needed to get on that flight in order to board another one in Louisville, or else the flight would have been canceled.
The company initially asked some of the passengers to give up their seats voluntarily, but since nobody volunteered, the flight attendants decided to randomly select passengers who were to leave the plane. Three people agreed peacefully, but the fourth refused to give up his seat.
Three Chicago Department of Aviation security officers arrived to forcibly remove the passenger, dragging the man down the aisle by the arms and legs while other passengers shouted in protest.