A flight attendant was tucking into their inflight meal when they allegedly spotted something they definitely didn’t order stirred into the dish - a severed snake’s head.

Giving a whole new meaning to snakes on a plane, the incident reportedly happened on a SunExpress flight from Ankara in Turkey to Düsseldorf in Germany on 21 July, according to aviation blog One Mile at a Time.

The SunExpress employee claimed they were eating their crew meal when they found a small snake’s head among the potato and vegetables.

Photos of the inflight meal and the offending item were shared on video that was picked up by Turkish news site Gazete Duvar.

A representative for SunExpress told Turkish press that the incident was “absolutely unacceptable”, and that the airline has paused its contract with the food supplier in question while an investigation is launched.

“With more than 30 years of experience in the aviation industry, it is our top priority that the services we provide to our guests on our aircraft are of the highest quality and that both our guests and employees have a comfortable and safe flight experience,” the airline said in a statement.

“We would like to inform you that the allegations and shares in the press regarding in-flight food service are absolutely unacceptable and a detailed investigation has been initiated on the subject.”

However, the catering company that supplied the meal has vehemently denied that it could have originated from their facilities.

A spokesperson for Sancak Inflight Services said: “SunExpress Airlines is a valuable client in our country and a popular airline in Europe, which recently decided to further expand its fleet and route network. They again announced a tender for catering services on board.

“We did not use any of the foreign objects that were supposedly in the food when cooking (due to the technical and thermal conditions used in the in-flight catering facilities).”

Foreign objects in your inflight meal are the stuff of nightmares, but a snake’s head is not the only one to crop up in a tray meal at 35,000 feet.

In 2019, a passenger onboard a Singapore Airlines flight was eating his meal when he bit into something unexpected: a tooth that didn’t belong to him.

And the same year a passenger on an Air India flight from Bhopal to Mumbai discovered a large cockroach in his breakfast.

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