Date: Fri Mar 22, 2002 12:36 pm
Subject: Dog Mauling and Air Safety

I thought that Mark's post from about 1 year ago is interesting in light of the TSB's conclusions in the recently released final report.

Here is a link to the story that Mark is referring to in his post:

http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/21/dog.mauling.trial/

Having been saturated with news and analysis of the California dog mauling case in recent days, I noticed distinct parallels between the factors that are cited as aggrevating in the dog mauling case and some salient characteristics of the SR111 crash. In particular:

Knowledge:
- The dog owners knew their dogs were dangerous.
- The air carrier, equipment manufacturers and regulators
knew that that proper certification procedures were circumvented
for the IFEN and that metallized mylar can spread a fire.

Prior incidents:
- The dogs exhibited numerous prior incidents of agressive behavior.
- There were prior incidents of smoke in the cockpit and in-flight
fires fueled by Mylar

Disregard:
- The dog owners were said to show no remorse.
- Everybody in any way involved in the crash is too busy covering
their butts, blaming someone else or worring about their profits
(or losses).

I suppose the real difference is, in the dog mauling case, the perpetrators are readily identified. I wonder how the dog mauling
case would have played out if the dogs were owned by a powerful multi-national corporation and trained by another corporation which in turn
contracted out the actual training to still another subcontractor. And for good measure, throw in a cozy relationship with the the
Federal Animal Administration and a bunch of politically connected board members ... and maybe a few big contracts to train military
dogs. Do you think anybody would be going to jail?

- Mark