Loose Dog at the Airport

A loose dog terrorized air traffic at Lindbergh Field on Saturday, December 11th. Airport authorities alerted Air Traffic Control personnel that a stray canine was running amuck along the single runway around 5pm.

The dog seemed to have been spooked by the arrival of a FedEx DC-10 freighter loaded with cargo that rumbled down the runway.

An American Eagle regional carrier managed to land before Air Traffic Control advised Southwest Airlines #939 on approach from Baltimore, MD to abort its landing.

Just as the Southwest plane was about to touch down, air traffic controllers told the pilot to circle around again because the dog was

still in the immediate vicinity.

Airport security personnel scrambled to roundup the intruder, but the dog managed to evade their grasp. (A dog colliding with a landing aircraft may take out a plane's landing gear or the animal might get sucked up into the plane's engines.) Air traffic control was heard on the air traffic control channel offering a caution to all incoming and outgoing flights.

As the airport authorities continued their search, operations appeared to return to normal. At 8:00 PM, a pilot was heard asking an air traffic controller "what ever happened to the dog?

The reply: "We finally caught that sucker!"