Delta passengers can now track pets with GPS at 10 U.S. airports

My grandma used to sing a song to me that went "Oh where oh where has my little dog gone, oh where oh where can he be," because nothing is more soothing to children than imagining that their pets are missing. Well, thanks to Delta's new GPS pet-tracking devices, the next line could be "Oh hey, he's right over here, he's sitting in Terminal C." Starting today, pet owners can pay for a GPS device to be attached to their animals' crates and can then monitor them in real-time, keeping track of the temperature outside their kennels, ensuring that they're still right-side up and – most importantly – knowing that the animals were safely and successfully loaded onto the plane.

The wireless devices, which cost $50 per pet, per flight, will be available at the Delta Cargo area of ten U.S. airports: Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis, New York's LaGuardia, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Tampa. The trackers were manufactured by Sendum Wireless Company and have previously been used to monitor donor organs that are being transported between hospitals.

Anxious owners will be notified of their pet's status before and after the flight but they will not receive updates during the flights because, ya know, everyone's cell phone is supposed to be in Airplane mode. If the temperature around the animal's crate exceeds 85 degrees, it will send an automatic alert to Delta's call center, but neither company specifies how that situation will be handled beyond an email with an exclamation point beside it.

Neel Jones Shah, a former Delta cargo executive who now advises Sendum, told Bloomberg, "when things go wrong with a pet, it often goes horribly wrong." He's right. Of the major U.S. carriers, Delta has had the highest number of pet fatalities over the last five years. In January, a four-year-old Walker hound named Duke died after a flight from Lexington, Ky. to Atlanta. And just last month, Delta temporarily lost track of several Westminster show dogs before eventually reuniting them with their owners.

Despite the in-flight limitations of the system, it's probably worth it for pet owners to have immediate, real-time reassurance that their animals are OK. Oh where oh where has my little dog gone? He's on the plane, as he should be.