Furry, feathered friends are pampered
Horses, polar bears and fish on move
The best part of being a travel writer is being able to peek behind the proverbial curtain to see how different facets of the industry function and operate. And few places are more interesting than Lufthansa’s (www.lufthansa.com) operations at Frankfurt Airport in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
My destination was the Lufthansa Cargo Animal Lounge located just outside the main airport complex in Cargo City, where I met Axel Heitmann, the facility’s director of Competence Centre Animals.
After donning protective boots for my dress shoes and having traded my overcoat for a lab vest, Heitmann whisked me through the immense facility.
My first impression of the lounge was how spotlessly clean it was. When I tell people I visited a cargo facility for animals, they invariably ask if it was dirty or smelled, but neither was the case; you could have eaten off the floor. Natural light is filtered in through a variety of skylights, and the facility is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. It was a world apart from anything I had expected. “It’s really amazing,” says Heitmann.
His eyes brighten and he becomes more animated as he tells me how many horses they usually ship in a single year (around 2,000) and about some of the larger animals they’ve seen at the facility (a full-sized polar bear). During my visit, I saw dogs, cats, fish, and roughly 20 horses, all destined for new places. The animal lounge was every bit as busy as its human counterpart.
Heitmann explained that the facility was designed in three distinct sections, split down the length of the building. One side is for any animals coming into the European Union, another is for animals leaving the EU, and a third side is for those animals that are in transit on connecting flights. Each side can work independently of the others or in concert with it. Animals are screened coming into and leaving the country, and each one has a detailed waybill showing who the shipper and receiver are, where it originated, on what flight, and where it’s headed.
Here’s where things get really cool: the lounge has 42 large animal stalls that are fully extensible; 39 small animal boxes; specially-designed aviaries; 12 temperature- and climate-controlled chambers for sensitive animals and birds; and black light examination rooms for ornamental fish sensitive to daylight. The entire air supply is exchanged three times every hour, and any run-off that enters the drains in the facility is stored for days in tanks until it is analyzed and deemed safe to enter the Frankfurt sewage system. It’s just one of the safety catches designed to keep this state-of-the-art facility open around the clock.
“One of the principle ideas is to always keep things running,” Heitmann says as we start to leave.
“There are always animals coming; from us, from other airlines. When you have a flight from Singapore that’s 12 hours long, and they are in the air, you can’t say, ‘Oh, we need to shut the whole place down.’ You can’t do it.”