Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/13/dog-dies-on-flight-after-unite.html
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Snopes says 18 animals died while being transported on United last year, which is three times as many as all other domestic carriers combined.
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Did the attendant maybe only mean for the puppy carrier bag to be in the overhead for take off and landing? Even then, I can’t imagine how that would seem better than under the seat, …
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I don’t see how that would be consistent with
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US Cops: We can needlessly murder your pet in the most inhumane way possible.
United Airlines: Hold my beer.
Seriously though, someone should stuff the attendant into an overhead bin.
And United Airlines is clearly beyond repair. It manages to stand out as especially evil in an era defined by cartoonishly evil corporations.
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I’m just trying to imagine how any flight attendant could be so heartless and trying to imagine a slightly less heartless scenario.
Attendant says: That bag doesn’t fit. It needs to go in the overhead.
Passenger: But it’s a puppy.
Attendant: We can’t take off with it there. (Attendant assumes passenger understands it’s only during take-off but doesn’t explicitly say that.)
Attendant never comes back to say - hey do you need help getting the puppy down now that the seat belt sign is off.
Dead puppy, crying kids. Lots of witnesses. No way the airline wants to fight this no matter how it happened.
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I actually have a hard time blaming UA itself for this tragedy, I doubt they trained anybody to insist dogs travel in the overhead. This sounds like a flight attendant with no common sense and high on authority. People put animals under the seat in front of them all the time in carriers designed with the airline’s rules in mind, my in-laws chose their breed for this purpose.
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Clearly they haven’t spent enough time training flight attendants in the PROPER procedures for animals in flight or the airline wouldn’t have such a high rate of animal deaths compared to all their competitors.
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I saw a gross number cited not a rate, UA is a very large carrier. But poor training seems rampant from attendants to security.
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I’m fairly sure United doesn’t carry three times as many passengers as all other domestic airlines combined.
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Yah, took a look at data, you’re right. Don’t fly UA with a pet.
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Poor training and unethical behavior are usually signs of institutional dysfunction which in turn results from bad leadership. And UA has demonstrated a clear pattern of abusive conduct.
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She sat in the airplane aisle on the floor crying, and all of surrounding passengers were utterly stunned,
This is the coda to a disturbing number of United flights. Are United attendants even human beings?
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So, you’re against a United Boycott?
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I mean, they’re drilled to get everything stowed, either above or below, because if there’s an emergency anything not stowed becomes a missile flying through the cabin at 100-200mph. And you can’t be stowing things before an emergency, because it’s an emergency.
But this doesnt explain why she couldnt stow the puppy below the seat.
Of course, it it had been a baby, she could have held it (which raises other still unresolved issues). For a culture that goes nuts over safety of their children in cars, this [below] should not be the accepted crash position:
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When we were flying with under 2s, we also though it bizarre, even though we did it to save the money. Is the theory that an infant flying around the cabin in a crash is less lethal to other passengers than a laptop?
There was a movie where a guy has a woman hold a toolbox in his car and crashes it into a wall to prove to her she couldn’t have saved her baby in the plane crash.
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You’re talking about an incredibly wonderful movie from 1993 called Fearless with Jeff Bridges, Isabella Rosellini, and Rosie Perez. So good!
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Better yet, don’t fly United. It seems like we can’t go a single month without a horror show from that airline.
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Agreed and I’ll help you with the stuffing
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