I see that Pet Airways is now taking reservations for flying your pet around the country. They've also changed a couple things on their website since my last post about them:

• Their route map now spells "Los Angeles" correctly;
• they now say their fleet will consist entirely of Beechcraft 1900 aircraft, and not the formerly-claimed fleet of Boeing 727s, Convair 580s and 5800s, and Dassault Falcon 20s. Also absent from their fleet information page is the company's statement that it would operate flights under Part 121 and Part 135 of the Federal Air Regulations. The FAA's website still shows no operating certificate for Pet Airways, nor does it show one for Panther Air Cargo, Pet Airways' presumptive parent company or partner;
• They also no longer mention that they have a fleet of 20 planes. I wonder how many they do have -- they currently are taking reservations for East-to-West flights on Tuesdays and West-to-East flights on Thursdays, so they could be operating as few as one aircraft;
• They've removed Dan Wiesel's and Alysa Binder's last names from the photo caption on this page.

I also found this story and this one, which say that Pet Airways is contracting with "Suburban Airlines" and "Suburban Air Flight, Inc.", respectively. Google searches for "Suburban Air Flight" turn up nothing, and searches for "Suburban Airlines" pretty much bring you information about the former Allegheny Airlines subsidiary of the same name. (I also don't see an FAA certificate for Suburban,  either.)

Interestingly enough, I wonder if this news story's reporting came from my previous post. It doesn't credit me with anything, but it was published two days later, and has some details that I hadn't seen reported about Pet Airways anywhere until I published my post.

(Oh, and of course the Hotelicopter was an April Fool.)

UPDATE: I heard from Steve Huettel, the writer of the St. Petersburg Times story. He used some of my research as a jumping-off point, but had also been working some other angles of the story before I published. He's a good egg.

I also think it's very interesting that the Pet Airways site has been intermittently available since they said they were taking reservations. Apparently there's been a lot of buzz online -- but what I thought was interesting also was that when the site is up, the reservations page says they're overwhelmed and are only taking reservations by e-mail. (And when the site is down, they're apologizing "for the incontinence." Shouldn't they leave that to the pets?)

ANOTHER UPDATE: "Incontinence" now changed to "inconvenience." That was fast.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: It looks like their partner is Suburban Air Freight, not "Suburban Airlines" or "Suburban Air Flight." And they have an operating certificate -- not sure why it didn't come up at the FAA's site. They have Beech 1900s, too...so the pets may ride in something similar to this. 

I'm not thrilled that Pet Airways essentially accused me of spreading "false rumors" about them; as I noted, I explicitly said that I don't think it's a hoax. I'm also glad they finally answered my questions, however grudgingly.