Delta Flight Delayed Three Hours After Tarantula Escapes From Carrierbo

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  Idea for a new movie: All Your Nightmares On A Plane, featuring every kind of creepy, crawly slithery thing that’s ever gotten loose on a plane and freaked the heck out of everybody. Joining that old standby of a snake on a plane — and we’ve seen a few of those — and its pal in arachnid creepiness, the scorpion, is a familiar fuzzy guy that might make your skin crawl: a tarantula, who got loose from its carrier and delayed a recent Delta Air Lines flight while humans scurried around trying to find it.

  The flight was scheduled to take off from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport around 7 p.m. Wednesday, heading to Atlanta, reports WSB-TV.

  But Delta said baggage handlers on the ground noticed that a baboon tarantula (which frankly, I wouldn’t want to encounter in a dark alley) had escaped its carrier, prompting the captain to ground the plane in Baltimore overnight so it could be searched for any other spiders that may’ve decided to take a walk.

  “It was not in the passenger cabin and customers were not on the aircraft when the tarantula was discovered,” a Delta spokesman said in a statement.

  The captain clued in passengers and told them they’d be switching planes for the flight “out of an abundance of caution,” which we can only imagine they had no problem with once they realized a furry orange spider was hanging out somewhere. Passengers arrived in Atlanta about three hours behind schedule.

  There’s also good news for the owner of the spider, as another spokesman told the Baltimore Sun that the tarantula was apprehended, and the airline contacted the handler to verify it was the only spider in the cage. Maybe that’s why it left in the first place, ever think about that? Even freaky furry spiders need love.

  Tarantula delays Delta flight from Baltimore to Atlanta [WSBTV]

  
  
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by Mary Beth Quirk

via Consumerist