A Delta Airlines passenger says he was sitting in his seat, waiting to take off from LAX last week when an airline employee told him his six-year-old rescue dog had disappeared.

Frank Romano says the airline never found his rescue pitbull, Ty, who he had loaded into a kennel and handed over to Delta for a Tampa-bound flight. Romano told CBS the airline gave him several excuses for the screwup.

"She said your dog bit through the kennel. And we need you to just identify the dog. And then she changed her story that they couldn't find my dog. And that the dog had been lost for an hour," Romano said.

Although Romano and his family got off the flight and searched the airport for Ty—who was reportedly microchipped—they still have no clue what happened to him.

More than a dozen pets died at the hands of airlines in the last year, most after chewing through their kennels. It's not clear, however, whether any of those animals actually disappeared.

But, LAist points out, Delta seems to have a particularly egregious track record when it comes to pets (and sometimes children):

In 2011, a New York man bought a puppy in Alabama, then arranged to have the puppy sent back to New York along with him. Delta temporarily misplaced the dog, then found it in Atlanta.In 2011, a German Shepherd headed from California to Germany to join its owner—a couple in the Army—got loose in Atlanta while under Delta's care. That dog was later hit by a car and died. Another unsatisfied Delta customer reported that he and his girlfriend had adopted a stray dog in Mexico in 2010, spent money nursing him to health and then made plans to bring the dog back to their home in Canada with them. Delta allegedly also gave them the run-around as to where the dog was with a similar story about an escape, but couldn't seem to produce the dog.

Delta also mixed up two children in 2010—a boy and a girl—sending one to Boston and the other to Cleveland when it was meant to be the other way around.

Delta reportedly offered Romano a $200 voucher—the cost of the dog's ticket—as an apology.