Home / Guides / Flying with pets
Operators who publish the figure put it at roughly one private flight in five carrying an animal, and almost every enquiry about it asks the wrong question. People ask whether the aircraft will take a dog. It will. What decides whether the animal travels is a blood test taken months earlier — and no aircraft, price or operator can shorten that clock.
The short answer
If the rabies vaccination has been kept valid with no gap between boosters, and an acceptable antibody result is already recorded in the passport, neither the test nor the waiting period is asked for again — by Türkiye or by the EU. Bring the passport and the original certificate and the date is yours to choose.
A booster given after the previous one expired counts as a first vaccination, and the whole chain restarts: 30 days to the blood test, then three months to the border. An unvaccinated dog is four to five months from Europe. This is the only part nobody can shorten.
Which one you are in is decided by one date — the day of the last rabies booster, and whether the one before it had expired. Send us that date and we will tell you in the first reply.
A rabies antibody blood test taken today does not let your dog enter the European Union or Türkiye for three months. For Japan and Australia the wait is 180 days. And the blood sample itself cannot be taken until at least 30 days after a first rabies vaccination — so an unvaccinated dog is realistically four to five months from entering the EU, and seven to eight months from entering Japan.
This is the whole reason the page exists. If you are flying in six weeks and the vaccination has not been done, the animal cannot travel legally to those destinations, and we would rather tell you that today than sell you a flight you will have to unwind. The one thing we will not do is put you on an aircraft and let you discover it at the border.
This page is planning information, not veterinary or legal advice. Requirements are set by the authority of the country you are entering and they change. Before any flight we check the current rule against that authority for your specific date and animal, and put what we find in writing.
The chain, in order
The order matters as much as the dates. A rabies vaccination given before the microchip does not count, and has to be given again — the single most common and most expensive mistake in this process.
Step 4 is why this cannot be bought, expedited or argued with. The wait exists to prove the animal was not already incubating rabies when it was vaccinated, and each authority has made its own judgement about how long that takes — 180 days at the cautious end, three months where the exporting country's own rabies control counts for something. It is a regulatory window, not a biological constant, which is why the same dog meets two different numbers. What does change the arithmetic: an animal whose rabies vaccination has been kept continuously valid, with no lapse between boosters, does not repeat the blood test or the wait at all. Keeping the booster current is worth more than any amount of planning later.
By destination
Puppies and kittens under three months and unvaccinated are handled case by case, against the rabies status of the country they are coming from — ask before you plan around one. Checked against the European Commission, the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the UAE Ministry of Climate Change and Environment, Japan's Animal Quarantine Service and Australia's Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry on 14 September 2026. Where a figure is not in this table, we do not have it from the authority itself and will not print it.
Two rules that end trips at the ramp
Both are knowable a month in advance, and both are absolute.
The banned breeds. The UAE prohibits import of, among others, the American Pit Bull Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, American Bully, Cane Corso, Boerboel, Bullmastiff, Neapolitan Mastiff, French Mastiff (Dogue de Bordeaux), Brazilian Mastiff (Fila Brasileiro), Argentinian Mastiff (Dogo Argentino), Tibetan Mastiff, Bully Kutta and Perro de Presa Canario. There is no permit route around this and no discretion at the border. If the passport says one of these words, the answer is no — and it is better to learn that from us in writing than from an inspector with the aircraft on the stand.
The annual limit. Personal import is capped at two cats, or two dogs, or one of each, per year — separate from the movement of animals already resident in the country. A family moving three dogs is not a scheduling problem, it is a structural one, and it needs to be raised before anyone books.
The permit has a shelf life. Ninety days from issue. Pulled too early it expires before you fly; left too late it is not there when you need it. It sits in the middle of the plan, not at either end.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar each run their own permit and health-certificate regimes with their own documents and their own lead times. We confirm the current requirement with the destination authority for your date rather than working from what was true last season.
The breed list and the annual limit are published by the UAE Ministry of Climate Change and Environment; checked 14 September 2026. Saudi and Qatari requirements are confirmed case by case and are deliberately not listed here.
On the day
Private charter
Cabin · with you
The animal travels in the cabin, not in a hold, with no separate check-in and no transfer through a cargo terminal. For an older dog, a nervous one, or one that simply cannot be shipped as freight, this is the reason the flight is being chartered at all.
What is still not automatic
Operator's aircraft · operator's rule
Acceptance is the operator's decision, and a few decline animals on particular aircraft or particular interiors. We ask before we quote, not after, and the answer — with any cleaning charge — goes on the quotation in writing.
What we ask you for at enquiry, so the first reply is a real one: species and breed, weight, the microchip number, the date of the last rabies vaccination, whether a titration test has ever been done and on what date the blood was taken. Those six facts decide whether your date is possible. Everything else can follow.
What we actually do
We start at the date you want to land and count back through the five steps. That gives one of two answers: the latest day each step can happen, or the earliest date the animal can legally arrive. Both are useful. Only one of them is what you hoped for.
If the dates cannot be met we say so, in the first reply, before any discussion of aircraft. We would rather lose the booking than have an animal turned back at a border — that outcome costs you a quarantine, and costs us the client anyway.
Microchip, vaccination record, titration certificate, health certificate, import permit. We check them against the destination authority's current requirement for your date, and tell you what is missing while there is still time to fix it.
One more thing worth saying plainly: if your dates are fixed and the clock has not been started, no operator and no broker can fix this, ours included. The only real remedy is starting the chain early — which costs a vet visit and nothing else.
Send the dates
The operator named, the aircraft type, one figure with the inclusions listed — and a straight answer on whether the paperwork can be ready in time. If it cannot, that answer comes first.
Request aircraft options → go@aeroinis.com
Read alongside what a charter costs and the Charter Agreement. We do not sell seats: the aircraft is chartered as a whole, by you.