traveling with large dog

ahhhhhh a GSD!!!!! I have a sweet female sable GSD.
You'll need a health certificate, a kennel & try to get the shortest flight & fewest connections possible.
When you make your reservations, be sure to make one for the dog. Airlines only allow so many animals per flight both in cabin & in luggage compartments. You'll also need to pay for him/her to fly as well........it's like 150-200 bucs!
I've flown AA , Delta & Us Air............best experience was with Delta, how ever our beast is a service animal & all she knows she just flies coach.....lol.
Arrive early, make sure your GSD has pottied & has fresh water in a kennel (see airline size restrictions) & all your paperwork is ready to show the attendants.
If your dog has separation problems, ask your vet for a happy pill to calm him/her down prior to flying. Also YOU stay calm & relaxed, your animal will pick up on your nervousness too!
People fly everyday these days with a pet, so its old hat for the airlines now. Just call your airline of choice & they will help you.
🙂
Welcome home snowbird & maybe our shepherds can meet.

There is a lot of information about flying with dogs on this site. I found AA were good. Make sure the kennel is big enough because if your dog's ears touch the top they may say it is too small, and I don't know if AA keeps the very large kennels in stock at the airport. As for the "happy pills" from the vet, you may be better off taking them yourself. I gave them to one of my dogs and they made him crazy! He normally gets a bit hyper and excited when he travels, so for the sake of my other (quiet) dog, I gave him the tablets to calm him down. They made him 100x worse. I think islandtyme is right, that the dogs probably pick up on your stress too, and moving is very stressful. Good luck!

I also attached some baggies on top of the kennel with treats and a note with my dog's name and asking people to give him treats.

Also be careful with large dogs, the kennel and the dog must be under 100lbs to fly on a passenger plane, otherwise you have to do cargo.

Also, we had a larger dog and American Eagle (via Puerto Rico) wouldn't accept larger crates so we had to choose a flight going through Miami.

As I recall the largest size kennel for American Eagle was either a 400 series or 500 series kennel. If you have a bigger kennel one option is to fly into San Juan on a regular American jet and then transfer to Seaborne airline which can take a kennel one size bigger than American Eagle.

The other options are the twice/week Delta (and possibly American?) jet service directly from U.S. hubs to STX.