When Zach, a nine-year-old, sixty-pound Staffordshire Terrier, bounded off a Pet Airways plane in Los Angeles last September, he had a chew toy in his mouth and a spring in his step.
Zach was being reunited with Eileen Barber, his companion since he was a year old. Barber had been forced to give Zach up when she relocated from Williamsburg, Virgini., to San Diego and her new landlord would not allow pets at first. Fortunately, for both owner and pet, the landlord eventually relented and Barber looked forward to bringing Zach, who had been living in a shelter, to her new home.
But a ten-day roundtrip journey by car was out of the question, so Teri Parkhouse, manager of Ring Dog Rescue, the shelter that had been caring for Zach, looked into the possibility of flying him in the cargo hold of a commercial airline.
“Zach had been through a lot,” Parkhouse said. We were concerned it would be too stressful for him to fly commercial.” After much investigation, Parkhouse discovered Pet Airways, a Florida-based airline that describes itself as “a pet-only airline dedicated to pet-friendly travel.”
Pet Airways Takes Wing
Founded by start-up business consultants Alysa Binder and husband Dan Wiesel, Pet Airways launched July 14 with weekly flights between the Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, and Baltimore/Philadelphia/Washington, D.C. areas, cities with significant numbers of pet passengers. Binder, who now serves as Pet Airways’ executive vice president, said she expects that the airline will serve twenty-five cities in the next couple of years.
Binder and Wiesel were inspired to found Pet Airways because of the trauma that their Jack Russell Terrier, Zoe, experienced while flying in the cargo hold of a flight from San Francisco to Del Ray Beach, Florida, when the couple relocated.
“Zoe was shook up by the flight across the country,” Binder said. “[She] had been a gregarious little dog, full of energy. But immediately after the flight, she just wasn’t,” Binder said. This is when Binder and Wiesel knew they had to come up with an alternative solution for pet travel.
