While it is obviously sad, and there’s a degree of WTF to putting a puppy in a bag into an overhead locker (which presumably contained other things) there’s also a huge level of WTF are you doing taking an animal into a plane in a carrier bag?
What did god invent hard pet carriers for?
That’s nice and convenient for the corporatists out there. Sure, you were beaten, your puppy killed, and your guitar smashed but those were our employees who did that, not United Airlines. United Airlines can’t be held responsible for the actions of each and every one of its employees and the littanly of stories you have read about mistreatment at the hands of United are merely isolated incidents and in no way reflect the core values of our airline.
At United we have no say in who we hire and proper training in customer service and basic humanity is very expensive so we just skip that.
edit to respond to all the “why didn’t the passenger…” and other comments shifting the focus on the owner of the puppy. The reason they brought a puppy on board in a bag is because no one suspected they would encounter an inhumane person who would use their authority to put an innocent puppy in mortal danger. That’s not a reasonable assumption to make under pretty much any circumstances and to monday morning quarterback what you think should have been expected or done differently by the dog owner flies in the face of common sense and decency.
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Are you saying the puppy was dead already and the whole thing is a sham?
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What about an overhead bin is lethal? Are they airtight?
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My own anecdote about flying United recently. I was on a flight from STL-SFO with at least 6 screaming babies. I’m sensitive to high pitched noises, and I had one of the worst headaches of my adult life from that shit. I was in an ungodly amount of visible pain and not once did the cabin crew ask to check if I were okay. It could have had something serious, and they never checked in on me; just turned the other way and pretended nothing was wrong (probably because they didn’t want to risk diversion if I had to get medical attention). I know there wasn’t a lot they could do (flight was completely full), but checking in is kind of a bare minimum.
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If it were not for the schnorrers who run UAL, and their $125 “pet in the cabin” fee, I would transfer the focus to the owner of the puppy.
There is a subset of pet owners in America today who think “I am entitled to bring my animal on a plane, in whatever carrier (or no carrier at all), and the cabin crew and all the other passengers just need to meet my needs and my entitlement”. United and other airlines who charge for a pet in the cabin are enabling this. They should stop, and this entitlement should just fucking go away.
(edit) I think that @Michael_R_Smith may have a point about a Frenchie not being able to breathe at cabin-pressure altitude. The little guy may have suffocated even if he was sitting in his owner’s lap.
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I hate it when people ask this question. Yes, they are human beings. Evil, heartless human beings, but human beings nonetheless. Erasing their humanity erases their culpability.
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Unless you have some information about this event that might indicate this situation involved people who behaved badly and behaved as if “the cabin crew and all the other passengers just need to meet my needs and my entitlement”, then your comment has no merit and amounts to little more than aggressive whining about an imaginary group not being discussed here. It seems little more than an attempt to paint these victims as members of some group created from whole cloth for the purpose of derision when none is due.
As for your suggestion that the dog may have died anyway, that’s a baseless assumption that again attempts to place blame on the victim.
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No animals on planes unless they are trained service animals, period. Then no puppies die, no one gets blamed for anything and we are (I hope) discussing a more pleasant topic.
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Happily, no one is putting you in the position to make that call.
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No need to make me dictator.
Let’s put it to a vote of everyone who has flown on a US domestic flight in the last two years.
I’ll happily abide by the result.
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I have two questions…
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it is totally acceptable to store items in the overhead as well as under the seat, so why did the attendant insist on overhead storage being used? Did I miss the explanation on that?
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Again, maybe I missed this…how is that overhead storage killed the pup? Was it squished or something? Because it would have had air, those bins are not air tight (to my knowledge). I know it probably isn’t important, I am just not understanding how this killed the poor doggo.
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“Friendly Skies,” my ass!
To #2 - I’m betting the carrier was soft and the doggie was squished.
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Happily privately owned businesses are not subject to any vote you may call for.
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Poorly trained or untrained staff in such positions of authority means you’re basically running harmful social experiments on masses of people (and their poor animals). This means that someone who has no direction except their own feelings in the moment gets to have final say on serious matters:
I think the dog should go in the overhead bin because what I say goes.
I think that passenger should get off the plane and I can call the police to remove him using excessive physical force because what I say goes.
Airline staff have a great deal of authority in the wake of Sept. 11, and most people don’t want to second-guess them for various reasons, so when the airline abdicates responsibility in this way this serious crap is just going to keep on happening.
At the top levels of management they’re quite possibly saying to each other, “This is why we retain so many lawyers,” and not thinking there’s a mainspring cause that they could do anything about.
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The whole lap-child at <= 24 months thing is to discourage people from looking at the cost of an incremental extra seat on the plane and opting to make the same trip by car instead. Even in car seats, etc., the risk of injury or death to an infant is much greater from an overland car trip than from flying, even as a lap child.
The real safetysaurus thing to do, if you’re so inclined, is to fly and to buy an extra seat and bring an FAA-certified carseat on board. (Most carseats are FAA certified nowadays.) It’s marginally safer.
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8000 feet? That’s an awfully low cruising altitude. 
Real issue is that airplane cabins are pressurized only to 0.8 atm or so, and the animal (in a bag, under the seat) may not be getting great air flow to begin with.
Certainly airflow in the overhead bin is much, much worse.
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The reporting-that-I’ve-read availability bias in your post here is astonishingly large.
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