This story is included here with permission from its author
Today I received the following from a good
friend who is a local Saluki breeder. His business takes him into the air
once a week and Lord knows he understands the airlines more than most.
This is a true story from the horses mouth, Mr. Peter Lowe, Shafiq Saluki's.
Since we often hear of the terrible stories of airline travel with pets,
I thought this would be a nice Christmas
story.....my applause to United:
We all have horror stories of dogs traveling on Airlines and I must confess we try to ship our dogs by air as little as possible. There have been some terrible stories in the press and on Television recently.Today, however, I was exposed to an incident that proved to me that sometimes the airlines really go out of their way to make it safe for our traveling pets. I fly a lot for business as some of you know, today I was
on UA 1783 from Denver to Ontario California, which now has a really nice
new terminal.This was my 104th flight on United this year. The temperature in Denver was
15 below zero. As we climbed up out of Denver I could see Pikes Peak on my
left as the Captain came on over the speakers and told us he had a problem.
He told us that the heat had gone out in the cargo hold and that there was a dog traveling in a kennel down there. If we did not land in a warm place soon the dog would freeze to death. He told us that he was heading for Albuquerque 400 miles South. The Captain told us not to be concerned about all the liquids coming off the wing because they were jettisoning fuel so that they could land in Albuquerque . I guess we were too heavy for that little airport.I reasoned that he could not land in one of the Colorado Airports as they were too cold and that he could not go West because he would have had to climb up over the Rockies and that would be colder yet. He could reach New Mexico without going very high. In fact the weather in Albuquerque was quite nice as we landed and waited with eagerness to see what had happened to the dog.
As we all stood on the right side of the plane peering out of the windows, watching the ground crew get into the cargo hold I spoke to the dog's owner, a very concerned young lady who described it as being as being a 15
pound Terrier. I had hoped it was a Malamute and not a Mexican Hairless, I
guess this was halfway in between.The dog was fine, I was told it continued the journey in the passenger cabin. He had probably been asleep all the time in the cargo bay.
I feel I need to tell this story because we hear so many negative things about the airlines; this is a positive story. We all got a $25 discount coupon to compensate us for the delay, it was really unnecessary, the
Captain got a round of applause when we got to our destination three hours late. I estimate it cost United Airlines between $10,000 and $100,000 to save the life of that little dog. I will continue to give United Airlines my support.