Should Pets Actually Be Allowed on Planes?

In this life, certain topics of conversation are all but guaranteed to get people arguing. I know the subjects you’re probably thinking about — topics like politics, religion, and Taylor Swift. Those all fit the bill, but I’m talking about something even bigger and more controversial than that. I’m talking about the great debate surrounding pets on airplanes.

Because flying these days is about as stressful as an FBI interrogation and expensive as purchasing a kidney on the black market, people tend to have very strong feelings about what is and is not acceptable. With more and more pets in the air each year, it’s no wonder they’ve inspired feverish debate (and viral stories) as well. 

Do a quick Google search for pets on planes, and you’ll find too many horror stories to count. On one hand, you’ve got the man whose dog died after getting kicked out of first class. On the other, you’ve got livid passengers who got booted to economy after their airlines gave their seats to service dogs. One flier got kicked off her connecting flight and stranded at the airport for 12 hours because her cat, Oni, pooped in his carrier, and another was horrified when an airline forgot to remove her Maine Coon, Mittens, from cargo at the end of a trip — unwittingly sending poor Mittens on two additional flights. All told, traveling with pets is not for the faint of heart. At the same time, animal air travel shows no signs of slowing down.

Pet travel increased 19 percent in the decade ending in 2023, and according to a 2024 survey from the American Pet Products Association (APPA), 22 percent of dog and cat owners reported traveling with their pets at least three times in the preceding year. That’s a lot of airborne furballs, so naturally, people have a lot of feelings. Columnists have called to ban pets on planes. Pet parents have asked why they can’t buy their pets actual seats on planes. Magazines have run full-blown features describing the chaos and confusion fostered by rapidly changing policies.

What’s a loving pet parent with upcoming vacation plans to do? 

How do airline workers feel about animals on planes?

As a dog mom of two and general animal lover, I’m just going to admit my bias up front. I love pets on airplanes — any and all pets. If it were up to me, I’d replace every human passenger on any given flight with a nice mixture of dogs and cats, albeit perhaps in separate sections of the cabin. Hell, I’d even accept an emotional support peacock (though bird lovers be warned: United Airlines will not.) Still, I recognize that not everyone will share my completely correct beliefs. Given that pets and air travel will both probably become even more popular in the years to come, I couldn’t help but wonder… what is the best solution? Is there any way at all to please everyone?

Obviously not. Still, the opinions I heard shed good light on why folks feel the way they do about pets on airplanes. For starters, I wanted to speak with someone who has every right to hate pets on planes — a flight attendant. Although some airline workers will inevitably (and fairly) hate the phenomenon, Joseph Hendel, who worked as a flight attendant for American Airlines from 2018 to 2024, never minded the occasional furry passenger. 

“I’ve seen Great Danes sit first class before and have better manners than most platinum members behave on a 45-minute flight to D.C.,” Hendel says. He never once had to clean up after an animal, and he never met a passenger with an allergy complaint related to pets on board. 

Still, Hendel admits, “the passengers and their support animals in carriers tend to try and push the limits.”

Apart from specially trained and certified service animals, pets are prohibited from leaving their carriers at any point during a flight. At least during taxi, take-off, and landing, they’re also supposed to remain on the floor. Nevertheless, Hendel says, some pet parents let their pals loose when they think no one’s looking.

“It’s not really a bother to the flight attendants,” Hendel says, “because we generally love pets and babies, as they are our best passengers.” At the same time, “safety is always the first priority, and it takes just one cat to leap across the aisle and start thrashing about to ruin it for everyone else.”

Flying with a pet requires a true cost-benefit analysis.

Cocker Spaniel parents Mark Law, a professor and Alison Law, a retired CPA, tend not to fly with their dog, Firefly. While she will fit under some airline seats, she’s right on the cusp. Plus, their veterinarian does not want her in cargo, which poses health risks like overheating, stress, dehydration, heart failure, etc. As if that didn’t make flying complicated enough, Mark can also often tell within minutes if there’s a cat on board, thanks to his allergies.

“Benadryl is my go-to in those situations,” Mark says, “but I don’t often pack it handy to have on a plane because it's not usually an issue. Hopefully it’s a shorter flight, and I just suffer and then I get Benadryl out of my bag when I get to wherever I’m going.”

“And he gets grumpy,” Alison adds.

The Laws did fly with a dog once many years ago, when they brought a puppy named Abby home from a trip to Iowa. Abby was small enough to fit comfortably under the seat in a carrier, but Alison found herself sitting with the carrier on her lap for most of the flight because the floor got so hot. Now, she worries about any animal sitting on a hot airplane floor — which, paired with having to “travel hell and gone” in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to find a pet-relief area back then, has made her even less eager to fly with a pet again.

Depending on who you ask, the rules surrounding pets on planes are either too loose or two Draconian. I used to fly with my older dog, Frasier, as an emotional support animal (ESA) before the airlines tightened their policies in 2021, which essentially banned ESAs. I can confirm that at least for those of us who had a letter from a medical professional, the entire process was almost fantastically easy.

Since then, however, it’s gotten both more annoying and more expensive to get Frasier approved for a flight. Airlines do allow psychiatric support dogs, aka PSDs. But getting Frasier certified as a PSD would require that I throw more time and money into hiring a trainer. And if I wanted to fly with him under the seat in front of mine, I would have to squash him into a carrier that fits there. At this point, I’d rather put him on my back and walk us to our destination than deal with the frustrations of air travel.

Evidently, I’m not alone. A few months after adding a Shih Tzu named Hopper to her family, Texas-based project manager Kimberlee Newmark planned a trip out of state to visit family. After researching airline policies, she was surprised to see how restrictive the rules would be. Even at 16 pounds, Hopper was too big to fit in an appropriately sized carrier, and putting her in cargo was a nonstarter.

“I worry about how Hopper would react to being away from us in a strange place for hours before a flight and during the flight itself,” Newmark says, “and if Hopper was lost like a suitcase, I would lose all hope of a sane and reasonable response.”

In the end, Newmark and her husband decided flying just wasn’t worth the hassle. “Instead, each winter when we visit family in Florida, we make a two-day drive each way,” she says, “and being able to bring Hopper is the biggest influence in our decision to do so.”

Unsurprisingly for a pet parent, Newmark has no problem with other airplane passengers who choose to fly with their pets. If anything, she says, she wishes airline pet policies were less restrictive and even suggests designating part of the cabin as a “pets and babies” section. I didn’t go to business school, and I admittedly know nothing about running an airline, but as someone who’d pay good money to sit next to a dog, this doesn’t strike me as a terrible idea.

The airline rules can also cause issues.

Philippa Main, a real estate agent and business consultant who lives in Virginia, frequently travels with her Chihuahua, London. Like Newmark, she believes airlines’ pet policies are too intense — especially given how angelic her own dog is on flights.

London’s first flight came when she was just a few months old, and Main recalls with pride that the tiny dog never made a peep. Instead, passengers found themselves listening to a baby scream.

“By the end of that six hours, the entire plane of people was exhausted,” Main says. “As we all got up to leave, they noticed that I had my dog on my lap and were shocked because they had [assumed that] they would have known a dog was present because it would have been unruly or barking or misbehaving.”

Main identified multiple pain points during the pet-travel experience. For one thing, she says, it’s unreasonable for airlines to charge pet parents to stow their pets under seats, as some airlines do, where they would normally store personal items for free. She wishes she could purchase a seat next to her for her dog — especially given that passengers can already do that for licensed service animals. Unfortunately, some other fliers get incredibly ticked off when even service animals take up a seat on a plane.

And finally, she points out that sometimes, the price of a non-service pet fee can exceed the cost of short and discounted routes. As far as she’s concerned, “You should never have to pay more than your own ticket for your pet.” For example, on American Airlines, as of Feb. 20, 2024 it costs $150 to carry on your pet; before that date, it was still a pretty pricey $125. I did a quick search for one-way, non-stop American flights leaving New York City to Washington, D.C. one month from today and found an early morning main-cabin ticket for $55. That means if you flew with your pet on that quick trip, you’d pay nearly $100 more for them than for yourself.

There are concierge airlines and air services that cater to dogs and dog parents — such as BARK Air and the soon-to-be-launched RetrievAir — that will shuttle you and your pup to where you need to go. As convenient as that sounds, the prices aren’t so much. A one-way flight on BARK to one of the eight cities they service will run you $6,000. RetrievAir’s average price will be at a lot cheaper at $750.

And the stricter the rules, the more people want to break them.

Main believes that clearer, less onerous pet policies could actually work in all passengers’ favor. As she sees it, the “emotional support peacock situation [in which a peacock got booted from a flight in 2018] did bring to light the fact that if we had already had policies and procedures in place that allowed people to bring their pets, the airline would not have been so caught off guard.”

In other words, when you offer only one loophole through a set of exhausting rules, people are naturally going to stretch it as far as possible. This creates nightmare scenarios for airline workers just trying to make it through the day.

Case in point: fake service dogs. For all the people who actually take their trained and certified service dog to the airport, there are those few who bend the restrictions to fit their needs. And you know it when you see it; there’s a dog wearing a service vest that looks like it cost $25 on Amazon, doing things a service dog would never do (like trying to run ahead of their person on a retractable leash or barking incessantly). In the absence of ESA exemptions, it seems many people are content to slap a fake service-dog uniform on their pups and dare airline workers to hassle them about it.

Still, Main believes the industry is trending toward a more pet-friendly experience. It’s certainly easier to bring a pet on a plane now than it was a decade ago, and as Main notes, many airports now feature more pet-relief stations — which indicates that they see the consumer demand. 

“I think, slowly, the players within the industry are realizing that people want to travel with their pets more,” she says. “And they’re accommodating that as well — which makes it a little bit easier for the animals to be more well behaved.”