Day: December 3, 2025

• RetrievAir CEO Benton Miller secured funding on “Shark Tank” for his new pet airline.
• The model allows large dogs to fly in the cabin with their owners, instead of an airline underbelly.
• Miller wants RetrievAir to be accessible to the everyday pet owner. Fares average $775 per seat.

Traveling with large dogs is a nightmare. Airline restrictions force heavier dogs into the often unsafe cargo hold, and only the uberrich can afford to ferry their furbabies on a private jet.

Frustrated by how hard it was to fly with his own Labradors, Maple and Willow — and often having to leave them behind — entrepreneur Benton Miller founded RetrievAir, a pet airline that lets oversized dogs (or any-sized dog or cat) ride in the cabin alongside their owners.

In an interview with Business Insider, Miller said the pet-air-travel sector represents a $5.5 billion US market with plenty of room for more players. RetrievAir fares average $775 per seat.

Miller recently turned to ABC’s “Shark Tank” reality show for funding and secured $776,000 from guest Shark and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in exchange for a 15% stake — a nod to Ohanian’s “Seven Seven Six” venture fund. Ohanian has a 100-pound dog named Adora.

Miller said Ohanian “understands burn” because of his tech background and “knows how to scale to a billion-dollar company.” RetrievAir, which launched in May, secured over $500,000 in sales within weeks of opening bookings.

Some veteran Sharks, including Kevin O’Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful, were skeptical of RetrievAir’s $80,000-a-week operating costs. But Miller said sales have since picked up, more cities have been added, and some routes — like New York to Florida — are even selling out.

RetrievAir is not your typical flight experience: Customers book flights online, but instead of navigating a crowded terminal, flyers and their pets meet at a small private airport about 45 minutes before takeoff. Security is faster and tailored to animals.

The pets don’t have to be caged and stuffed under the seat in front of you, and Miller said the chartered 30-seater Embraer E135 jet was modified from a 50-seater — giving each seat ample room for humans and animals to spread out.

Dogs over 40 pounds must sit in a paid, assigned seat next to their owner. Lighter pets can sit on their owner’s lap or at their feet, and each seat has a leash to secure the animal.

And there’s a flight attendant — trained in basic pet behavior — to keep everyone safe, watered, and full of treats.

Miller said the white noise from the engines relaxes most dogs, and they commonly sleep during the flight. They recommend owners of more anxious dogs bring a familiar toy or blanket to help comfort them.

Dogs must have their Rabies vaccine to fly. Luggage, snacks, and alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages are included for human passengers.

The plane makes a pit stop on the ground every two hours so the animals can use the bathroom (Miller said pet accidents are rare) and the jet can be cleaned. A flight from New York to Denver, for example, would stop in Chicago.

It’s less convenient than a nonstop, but it serves two purposes: It protects the health and comfort of the animals, and it allows RetrievAir to sell the trip as one long, single itinerary or split it into individual legs to capture more potential customers.

Pet-focused public charter carriers aren’t new. Companies like BarkAir and K9 Jets already schedule shared flights for humans and their pets. Miller said Ohanian’s involvement — paired with RetrievAir’s efficiency-focused model — has helped put the company on a stronger footing.

“We’ve had profitable days, profitable weeks,” he said. However, he added that their load factor, or the percentage of seats sold, still does not consistently reach the 50% level needed across all routes to reliably generate revenue.

Still, he said he’s focused on keeping the service accessible to everyday pet owners by offering lower fares and opening new routes, while maintaining the semi-private jet experience that makes the model work.

Fares range from $300 to over $3,000 per seat

Miller said the average fare is around $775 one-way per seat.

Some shorter upcoming trips, like New York to Washington, DC, in February 2026, are priced as low as $300. He said the lower DC price is possible because the plane flies into a smaller, less expensive airport about 30 miles from the city.

This could be a pain for travelers, but Miller said the location saves money. He added that he prefers these out-of-the-way airports because they’re also less congested and cover broader areas.

“Waukegan National Airport in Illinois is 45 minutes north of Chicago, but it’s also 45 minutes from Milwaukee,” Miller said, adding that smaller airports also reduce the risk of air-traffic delays.

Some RetrievAir trips are more expensive, such as the New York to Los Angeles route, which costs a little over $3,000 one-way per seat in February, or around $6,000 if the dog is over 40 pounds and requires its own seat.

That compares with the roughly $6,700 one-way ticket on BarkAir or K9 Jets on the same route for one seat. The two competitors charter Bombardier and Gulfstream jets that are half the capacity or smaller than the Embraer jet that RetrievAir uses.

RetrievAir flies to six US destinations and plans to add six more in 2026. Unlike both BarkAir and K9Jets, RetrievAir does not fly internationally, but plans to do so in the future. Miller said Seattle is among its highest-requested destinations.

“There are more pets than kids in the city,” he said. “Seattle attracts Canadians, especially in the Vancouver area, who may have a vacation home in Arizona or California and need our service.”

Specific boarding and seating strategies

RetrievAir’s Embraer jet is operated by the third-party carrier RVR Aviation. Miller’s team handles scheduling and bookings, while RVR manages the aircraft, maintenance, and crew.

The plane has three seats per row: a single seat on one side of the aisle (seat A) and two seats on the other (seats B and C). Miller said dogs up to 40 pounds can share their owner’s seat space and are placed in the A seats by the window.

Bigger dogs, however, need their own seat and are placed in B and C with their owner — with the pup riding in the window seat and away from where they could more easily sniff their neighbor.

Miller said there are precautions to ensure that aggressive or reactive dogs are kept away from other pets, like boarding back to front to minimize interactions. Pets and their owners are denied boarding if the crew anticipates an issue.

“There’s a bit of an honor system when booking, that’s when we ask for the temperament of the pup,” Miller said. “We will talk with the owner if the pet is not friendly, but if we think the pup may be too aggressive, we will ask them not to fly and refund their ticket.”

Movies can mean so many things to us, depending on the weather outside, the political climate, our mood on any given day. Sometimes, especially in an age where it’s often more convenient just to stay at home and stream, we take them for granted; we let them wash over us as we’re making dinner or tackling random household chores, treating them as entertainment afterthoughts rather than the main event. But every year, there are at least a handful of movies that demand we stop what we’re doing and pay attention, and 2025 was no exception. Here’s a selection of films that delighted me, that made me think—that stopped me. Perhaps they’ll bring some pleasure, and have some meaning, to you as well.

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Read more: The 10 Best TV Shows of 2025

10. One of Them Days

Dead broke? You’re not alone. In one of the year’s most boisterous and breezy comedies, Keke Palmer and SZA play two scrappy denizens of Los Angeles who have just one day to scrape together the $1500 they need to pay rent on their cruddy apartment. They try to sell their blood, with disastrous results. When the clothes they’re wearing are ruined, they’re forced to dive into a charity bin—which means they spend the rest of their already-challenging day in godawful day-glo leisure wear. They find a pair of rare vintage Air Jordans they hope to resell, but that plan goes awry too. Still, they come out on top, making One of Them Days—directed by Lawrence Lamont and written by Syreeta Singleton—the kind of movie that miraculously makes you feel better about everything. We could all use more of those.

9. Kill the Jockey

You’ll find echoes of Buñuel and early Almodóvar in Argentine filmmaker Luis Ortega’s swingy, surrealist neo-noir about a perpetually sozzled jockey, Remo (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), who’s forced into hiding when he suffers a serious accident involving the prized race horse of his mobster boss. After awakening with amnesia, he dons a fur coat, accented by a fetching head bandage, and adopts the guise of a woman he calls Dolores—perhaps the woman he’s always wanted to be. Kill the Jockey is playfully erotic, gorgeous to look at, and often confounding, the kind of inventive experiment we used to see all the time at the movies. Thank goodness someone out there is still making pictures like this.

8. The Mastermind

Kelly Reichardt’s almost-a-comedy about a hapless art thief in 1970s Massachusetts is a vivid portrait of a guy who’s had everything handed to him and still manages to be a lost soul. Josh O’Connor’s J.B. is an art-school dropout who decides, for nebulous reasons, to steal a quartet of valuable paintings. As he explains to his wife (Alana Haim), everything he’s done has been “mostly” for her and the kids—his lopsided reasoning is both gently funny and heartrending. Who wouldn’t buy anything O’Connor, with his darling secret smile, tells them? His slippery performance holds the movie steady. You never approve of J.B., but you feel something for him even so.

7. Sinners

Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, returning to their Mississippi Delta hometown after surviving World War I and a stint in Chicago. They’ve got money to set up a juke joint. Opening night is a success, until—or perhaps because?—a trio of bloodsucking white folk musicians show up at the door. Writer-director Ryan Coogler has made a picture that’s alive to the mystery of music, with its power to both divide and unite. Sinners is gory, seductive, exhilarating—but it’s wistful, too, as if its characters had glimpsed a possibility of freedom, unity, and happiness that, some 100 years later, is still out of reach.

6. Roofman

In recent years, we’ve been talking a lot about a crisis of masculinity in American culture, though no one has been able to define exactly what that means. Derek Cianfrance’s bittersweet romantic comedy, based on real-life events, inches toward an answer. Channing Tatum is superb as Jeffrey Manchester, a onetime robber and prison escapee who builds a new identity for himself, finding a new love (played, with sunny gravitas, by Kirsten Dunst) and a new family in the process. Roofman is about all the things so many men yearn for, incuding the basic ability to support a family. That used to be a reasonable goal; Roofman shows us how elusive it has become.

5. Peter Hujar’s Day

One winter day in 1974, New York writer Linda Rosenkrantz—here played by the always-tuned-in actor Rebecca Hall—sat down with her friend, photographer Peter Hujar, to hear him recount every little thing he’d done the previous day. That interview is the foundation for Ira Sachs’ quietly radiant Peter Hujar’s Day. Ben Whishaw plays Hujar as a seductive jokester, keyed into both the banality and the cracked glamour of the artist’s life. Hujar died in 1987, of AIDS-related pneumonia; he found fame only after his death. Sachs’ film is both a great New York movie and a reminder that so much of the art we love emerges from the margins of everyday life.

4. Sentimental Value

Love, death, real estate: those three words sum up both the messiness and the glory of family life, and here, Danish-Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier surveys it all with tender regard. Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas play sisters, raised in a sprawling yet cozy house that has been in the family for years; when their mother dies, they’re forced to reckon with the selfishness and self-absorption of their long estranged filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård). Houses may hold families together for many years, but they’re never the real glue. What really sustains us is the person—whether it’s a parent, sibling, partner, or whomever—who always has your back.

3. Blue Moon

Few filmmakers can give us two fantastic pictures in one year, but Richard Linklater, one of our most unassuming movie craftsmen, has done it. Ethan Hawke gives one of the year’s great performances as Lorenz Hart, the onetime writing partner of composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). Blue Moon takes place on a single night: Rodgers’ Oklahoma!, written with his new collaborator Oscar Hammerstein, has just become a massive hit, and Hart is forced to acknowledge that his friend and colleague has moved on without him. Witty, imaginative, and brushed with a whisper of melancholy, Blue Moon is a perceptive portrait of one of the 20th century’s finest lyricists.

2. An Officer and a Spy

Roman Polanski is one of our most controversial, and reviled, living filmmakers. He’s also one of our greatest. In his exquisitely crafted account of the Dreyfus Affair—which premiered in Venice in 2019 but didn’t receive a U.S. release until this year—Jean Dujardin gives a sterling performance as Officer Marie-Georges Picquart, the counterintelligence official who fought to free Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), wrongly accused of being a spy. At a time when our most cherished civic and moral ideals are threatened, an open mind is more valuable than ever.

1. Nouvelle Vague

Motivated by pure affection, veteran indie director Richard Linklater tells the story of how Jean-Luc Godard’s early masterpiece Breathless came to be: it’s 1960 Paris, and Godard (channeled here by magnetic newcomer Guillaume Marbeck) takes to the streets with an American star (the marvelous Zoey Deutch) and a raffish French boxer (a limber, sexy Aubry Dullin) to pull off a sublime act of guerilla filmmaking. Breathless changed movies forever, and Nouvelle Vague is the ultimate tribute, standing boldly on the side of beauty, of pleasure, of art’s power to keep us going.

Honorable Mentions: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Stephen Quay and Timothy Quay’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, Harris Dickinson’s Urchin, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest.