In Reply to: Flying on a Plane posted by Elvira on June 03, 1999 at 15:07:43:

: I'm going on vacation in August and want to take Elvira with me. I will be flying. Two weeks ago when I flew a woman had a bird with her in a little dog carrier, I didn't even realize that was allowed, I was thinking of just carrying her in my pocket. Any suggestions?

Good luck! My wife and I have flown with our gliders on several occasions.

What I have found is that many airlines have specific policies about what animals are allowed to be carried on. Rest assured that sugar gliders are not on that list.

Some counter agents will let them on, and some won't. The risk that you run is that you will be allowed to take them on your outbound flight, but not on the return flight. This actually happened to us. We were allowed to carry them on the first flight (after paying the airline's $50 fee), but we weren't allowed to carry then on with us coming back. We ended up having to stay an extra day and ship our gliders by Delta Dash.

BTW--Our vet only charged us for a health certificate if he hadn't seen them recently (within a month or two). If we had had them in shortly prior to a flight, he issued the certificate for free. Otherwise he did an examination and charged us for a normal office visit (about $20).

If you intend to carry them on in your shirt, make sure all your flights end well before they would be waking up. We snuck them on one trip and had a flight delayed several hours. About 11 p.m. one of them got out of the soft-side carrier we were using and crawled on a lady a couple rows back. Imagine the uproar that caused. Fortunately, the lady and the airline were both very gracious.

My advice is to call the airline well in advance, and call them several times to see if you get the same answer more than once.

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