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"Usually most pets are 'lost' on the ground," said Silversmith, the attorney who works on aviation issues. "But we don't have a good sense from the numbers of how many ever get recovered."
Silversmith follows the Department of Transportation's monthly reports regarding animal incidents, compiling them into more meaningful data that breaks down the info by airline and year. But because Silversmith is working from the original numbers, he says, the information can't show larger patterns.
"There's no record of how many animals fly without incident, so it's difficult to put any of this into context," Silversmith said. "There's also a fair number of cases where animals fall out of their crates but we never get an update or clear solution about what happened after that, even with people going to great efforts to find them."
The reports also fail to include non-pet animals, such as an incident last month involving a 40-pound male wolverine that attempted an escape at Newark airport. Small carriers that don't carry at least 1 percent of the population weren't required to report any animal-related incidents until January 2015. Incidents on international flights still don't get reported.
For years, acoustic guitarists and violin players have had horrifying stories of Martins, Gibsons, and ancient violins getting crushed by careless baggage handlers. "I watched as United Airline workers at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport threw my guitar around the tarmac. When I arrived at my destination my $3,500 Taylor guitar was broken and unplayable," says Dave Carroll, who ended up writing a song about the customer service nightmare that went viral on YouTube. But in 2014, the DOT passed a law saying if space was available, airlines must allow musicians to carry-on small instruments free of charge in order to protect them. So your inanimate musical instrument can now travel safely. Not so with your heavy-set pet kitten.
Karen Pascoe was moving from New York City to the Bay Area in 2011 with her two large cats — both over the 15 pound weight limit for carryon pets. American Airlines told Pascoe she had to check both of the feline fliers as cargo or baggage as opposed to keeping them under her seat.
Down in the luggage area, American Airlines employees stacked the crates (against protocol) on top of each other. The top crate, containing Jack, toppled, bursting open upon impact with the ground, letting Jack free. The Norwegian forest cat was lost inside the American Airlines terminal of JFK airport for 61 days. He fell out of the ceiling in the customs and border patrol office on the 61st day. He hadn't had food or water.
"He suffered injuries when he fell," said Mary Beth Melchior, founder of Where Is Jack Inc., an organization that advocates for safe air travel for animals in Jack's memory. "He had liver disease, so basically his organs had started to feed on themselves in his body, so he couldn't recover from his wounds. After 12 days in ICU he was humanely euthanized."
Melchior walks people through the always-dangerous process of flying with pets, and gives them advice on alternative solutions to boarding a plane.
"Our goal is to make sure what happened to Jack, meaning the mishandling or mistreatment of animals by the airlines, never happens again," Melchior said, adding a tip for animal lovers who travel by air. "If you wouldn't put your three-year-old in the conditions, don't put your animal in them either."
Jack's story garnered much media attention, but commercially or internationally flown animals still die without any reports or attention.
"For some reason breeders like to get their French bulldogs from Romania," Melchior said. "They have the pug noses and short faces, so they have a real hard time flying. We hear tons of incidents about French bulldogs dying en route from Romania, and they never get reported."
According to Silversmith and several other aviation experts I spoke with, if Poppy did fall out of a plane, it was most likely a small, unpressurized private plane similar to the one Nala, the dog who fell to her death in Kentucky, fell out of. Because when large commercial jets drop cargo, it's a much more serious issue that sometimes results in the plane crashing — and almost always generates a formal report.
Perhaps Poppy escaped her kennel while being loaded onto the plane, like Jack The Cat, but instead of hiding in the terminal journeyed outward, navigating the three-or four-hour trek across (or under) two highways and a mountain, brushing up against foliage and earning the scars my grandmother in Pacifica later cleaned up. The airline could have then truthfully told my family that Poppy "fell from the plane," and my grandmother just interpreted that as meaning the plane was in-flight when Poppy fell.
Desperate to find any trace evidence of Poppy's legendary fall, I dived into old microfilm classified ads in local newspapers. One, in a December 1969 issue of the San Francisco Examiner reads: "DOG—White, fluffy std. poodle, fem. Lost at S.F. airport. 12/20. Reward. 567-7132 or 567-4040."
It wasn't a true match. The always-elusive Poppy was a toy poodle, not a standard poodle. But it was one more piece of evidence that dogs, cats, and pets of all kind have been getting lost, injured, or killed on airlines for a long, long time. And until changes to the rules governing how animals fly with us on airplanes are made, there will be more Nalas, more Jacks, (maybe) more Poppys.
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