Airline Follies Part 67

Earlier this year I wrote about the curious case of a Delta passenger who was trying to bring a dog home from Mexico until the airline lost it. After giving the customer the runaround for two days, during which they initially claimed to have no record of any dog, and then claimed the dog was being cared for at the Mexico City airport, the airline changed their story (again!) and claimed that the dog had gotten out of its carrier and run away. At the time I just assumed that it was some sort of clumsy effort to cover up the fact that someone had stolen the dog and its carrier – especially since the airline never produced the carrier from which the dog supposedly escaped. And I might have gone on thinking this was the case, except there has been another case this week – and this time the disappearance took place on American soil…

You can read the story here if you want to, but the basic facts are that an Army officer was relocating from San Diego to a base in Germany, and paid Delta to ship her two dogs (a beagle and a German shepherd), but only the beagle arrived. When the customer asked what had happened, the airline told her that the dog had escaped from its carrier and run away, and offered to refund the shipping fee. In other words, the exact same story they gave when a customer’s dog disappeared in Mexico City. It was a dubious story the first time, but Mexico does not have the sort of compulsive airport security we’re becoming accustomed to seeing in the US, and it’s just vaguely possible that someone left a door open just at the time the dog managed to work its way clear of a carrier guaranteed by the FAA to be impossible for a dog to escape. At a US airport, however, we also have to believe that the cargo area was unattended and unmonitored, that no video cameras anywhere caught anything, and that someone left an access gate to the airport open and unmonitored…

All right, it’s still barely credible, given some of the laughable excuses for “security” we’ve been seeing out of TSA lately, although given that this was the third such incident in the past year (there was a second case about a month after the one I noted) I would really have expected Delta to handle it better. It doesn’t take too many episodes like this one before your reputation for being a safe way to transport your pets (formerly quite good) goes completely in the crapper. Unfortunately, there really isn’t much the customer (or any customer) can do about a case like this; pets are considered property, and unless a specific dog is a pedigreed show animal or the equivalent, it doesn’t really have a value in the legal sense. The customer can sue the airline for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but such cases are hard to prosecute, and you’re still not likely to gain any satisfaction by doing so. Of course, you could also tell everyone you can about the airline losing your dog…

From a business standpoint, I have to point out that if your security is bad enough that someone can steal a dog out of your baggage operations, it’s also bad enough that someone could steal things for which you could be sued for significant amounts, and it’s probably also bad enough for someone to sneak IN (say, with a bomb) which could result in enough liability to bankrupt your entire corporation, not to mention getting the responsible parties charged with several hundred counts of criminal negligence, negligent homicide, or even treason. The fact is, letting people make off with your customers’ belongings is not the same thing as allowing your employees to steal the office supplies. Whether the dog was taken by an employee, by someone who was able to sneak into the baggage area, or lost because your security was preposterously bad, it’s no way to run a railroad – or, in this case, an airline…