I scrolled through all the traffic looking to see if anyone else was thinking this too. I've had snakes as a kid and had friends with various species of snake. None would ever eat carrion. If it didn't twitch or scamper it was off the menu.

Yep...
I have a personal acquaintance who's a falconer. He's had a bird abatement contract with the USAF since I first met him 16 years ago.

There are over 30,000 commercial flights per day in the USA alone. Assuming the article is only discussing fires on US carriers (doesn't specify, but we'll give it to them). That means that even if all 22 fires happened this year the chances of a fire on a flight is 0.0002009%. Or in other words less than 1 in 497,727 thousand flights. The simple answer is know where the fire extinguisher is. Problem solved. Since in actuality only 1/2 the 22 fires were in the past 3 years the odds today are about 1 in 2.98 million. Compare that to the odds of me having to share a row with a fatty or a stinker which are about 1 in 3.

Hi everybody. Just wanted to stop by and say you are welcome. My now obsolete Eee non-touchscreen netbook was delivered yesterday. My decision to finally purchase thus ushered in this new generation of netbook (2 days later) for you all to enjoy. I'm getting tired of waiting for Android phones too so I better go buy a G1 so that 3 new Android phones will be released the next day. Otherwise we'll just have to keep waiting indefinitely.