A cockroach trapped between glass on a plane goes viral

When animals go viral, it’s often because they are super adorable, have fun facial expressions or maybe because they like to sit upright and … hold things, like Linus the chinchilla on TikTok. However, sometimes animals go viral because they’re weird or frightening.

But recently, one six-legged creature went viral for a different reason — it was stuck in a very unusual place. On an Aug. 16 flight from Xishuangbanna in the Yunnan province to Ningbo in the Zhejiang province, not far from Shanghai, one woman found herself amused by the antics of a cockroach that appeared to be trapped between planes of glass. She posted a video to Weibo, a Chinese social media platform that’s like Twitter (er, we mean X), and it promptly became a thing.

The original 10-second video may have disappeared, but it was reposted by multiple outlets, including @DiscoverGuangzhou on YouTube.

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The flight in question took place on Aug. 16 on an unnamed airline and was posted by a woman only identified by her surname, Guo. According to a repost by Boiling Point Video, Guo was “quite surprised to see it at the time,” and paid attention to it because it “added a little fun to her itinerary.”

A reporter from local media outlet Jimu News talked to the unnamed airline about the incident, which said that the cockroach might have climbed into the window after entering the aircraft with cargo or luggage. It said the aircraft had been inspected and disinfected and flight safety was not compromised.

Guo told the publications that she didn’t tell the flight attendant because she expected it to disappear after a few minutes.

“I didn’t expect it to still be there after flying 3,000 kilometers,” Guo explained. “But I couldn’t tell if it was outside the window. Still in the window sandwich.”

Apparently, the footage gained millions of views and lots of comments from people being surprised (or completely unsurprised) that a cockroach could survive at 10,000 meters in the air, and of course, jokes about the cockroach trying to avoid airfares.

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Unfortunately, there’s no word about what happened to the cockroach after the plane landed. We will probably never know if it survived. But let’s face it — it probably did, and is now exploring a new city about about 1,700 miles from where it started.