On Checked Pets and Animals:Something like 99 percent of the time, it’s dogs that are getting shipped -- passengers’ pets. And I know on some of the really big planes -- usually freighter planes - they’ve shipped deer and elk, bears and monkeys and other huge animals from one zoo to another zoo or between universities.
But on passenger planes, it’s mostly dogs. And most every airplane has two cargo compartments -- one forward and one behind the wing. Only one of the holds is heated, and at 30,000 feet it’s zero degrees or below inside the unheated cargo hold.
Sometimes the animal has been put in the wrong hold, and on a flight from
LA to
New York, you’re talking six hours of below zero temperatures, so the animal will die. It’s rare, but yes, but it does still happen, unfortunately.
Sometimes they catch the mistake. In
Chicago a few years ago, a plane bound for the west coast got diverted to
Denver after they realized an animal had been put in the wrong compartment. They found the dog and he was very, very cold, but he was still alive. Sometimes dogs will get loose in the cargo hold, too -- cages can unlock during turbulence. You open the pit door when the plane lands, and there’s a dog staring at you. We’ve had them jump out and start running on the tarmac and everyone’s trying to chase this thing down, trying to entice it with treats. We’ve even had to call passengers down to help round up their pet.
On Dead Weight:Dead bodies are on lots of flights -- especially flights departing from retirement areas. Airports like
Phoenix,
Tucson,
Fort Meyers and
Miami ship a lot of bodies. The cargo compartments are designed to hold them, and they usually go in the non-heated compartment.
The body is usually loaded in a coffin, and the coffin is strapped to a pallet that’s encased in white cardboard -- you would never know by looking at it, what it was. You’d just think it was a big piece of freight.
The only thing it says, on one end of the box, is ‘head’ -- all cargo compartments slope from the tail downward, and the instructions they give us are to keep the head elevated and the feet lower.
If you see a box with the word ‘head’ on it, for sure -- that’s a body. Most of the time the boxes are about six feet long. But sometimes, and it’s really sad, you’ll see one that’s just a foot long and you realize it must be a baby or a child. The box is so small and there’s the word ‘head.’
There’s a story from ten years ago where this guy was loading a body on a very windy day and the body fell off the belt loader and hit the ground and the whole box broke open. It fell from such a height that everything broke, and there it was...a body in a bag on the ground. But that’s very rare because bodies are very heavy and it usually takes two or three people to even move them around.
