This plane flew out of Texas full of four-legged passengers before retiring from its service.
One of Southwest’s Boeing 737-300s just took its final flight on Tuesday, from Texas to California – full of evacuees from Hurricane Harvey. But not human evacuees; this flight was full of orphaned cats and dogs from the storm. The flight carried 64 furry flyers from Austin to San Diego before the plane retired from service at the Southern California Logistics Airport boneyard. All the animals were in carriers in the main cabin of the plane, either buckled into seats or in the foot space below.
Volunteers from the Helen Woodward Animal Center in California staffed the flight to help escort the animals, all of which came from Operation Pets Alive, an emergency shelter set up in Houston to receive displaced shelter animals from throughout the city.
“There are shelters that have been devastated by Hurricane Harvey, without electricity, without supplies,” Mike Arms, Helen Woodward Animal Center’s president and CEO, said in a statement reported by The Dallas Morning News. “Operation Pets Alive has taken in an overwhelming number of orphan dogs and cats who had inhabited those shelters before the storm and were suddenly facing euthanasia simply because they had no place to go.”
At the Animal Center in California, the animals will be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and given a medical evaluation. Then they will be up for adoption.
Southwest donated this final flight to hurricane relief, and all crew members and staff that worked on the plane were volunteers from among the airlines’s employees.