Freight DogsFinally a forum for those midnight prowler types who utilise the unglamorous parts of airports that many of us never get to see. Freight Dogs is for pilots and crew who operate mostly without SLF.
VIP DC-8-72, Ferry Dhahran - Medina (a week or so earlier, ferry Houston - Dhahran.....), pick up 2 Falcons and 1 Handler and deliver to the 'fellas' in Algiers for an outing. Ah, what's 30,000+ gallons of Jet A anyway.....? (oh, late 80's, no problem....)
500 gallons of avgas in a very old and used bladder in a very old and used DC-3 up in Northern BC Canada. The Captain and I were sitting up front with the windows open and both smoking cigarettes when the bladder started leaking real bad. We very carefully put the smokes out, turned off the nav lights cause the gas was pouring out of the tail cone and through the tail light. We landed a short time later and finished our smokes. We lost a couple hundred lbs of gas though.
I just conjured up an image of having to dump some cargo (as it happens in movies .. ) to reduce weight ... wonder what the natives would think of a shower of currency
Had to dump cargo once in a DC-3 between Agadez( Niger) and Tamenghest (Algeria) because we had lost a motor and we were way overweight. We had a motorcycle raceing team from Begium onboard originally but left them behind to get home on a different aircraft. We also had the old engine that I had changed in Agadez, on board as well as the raceing teams equipment. I had to throw out ( while in flight ) everything from generators, tools, drums of oil, motorcycles and parts. After I had everthing out the door we were barley able to maintain altitude so I was going to start taking the engine apart and throw it out too but...I had already threw out the ships toolbox. The folks on the ground were probably very excited to see all this free stuff raining down on them.
In the mid 50's our squadron was TDY to Upper Heyford in the UK and after 116 days we returned to the states. Our CO had bought a MG and found that our tanker was almost empty of strap down cargo so against all regs it was loaded at night and returned to Kansas. If Lemay ever found out we would have all been in deep you know what.
Working at LHR 1970 or 71 when the PanAm Round the World flight PA1 was still a 707 (so no containers) I had the fun of helping placate the London terminating pax in the Customs Hall who were waiting for a VERY slow delivery of bags.
What the pax couldn't see was, on the far side of the wall, everyone else from the PA Station Manager down, frantically trying to clean VERY smelly monkey pee and poo from the (usually) expensive luggage that had been unfortunate enough to be loaded before Istanbul where the thoughtful loaders had placed a shipment of a number of cages of (apparently) incontinent monkeys directly on top of said bags!
The effects could not all be erased and some quite expensive damaged bag claims followed.
Picked up three caged male lions around 1997 in AMS on loan from the AMS zoo to the Joburg zoo. FE went down into the front belly to look at them and came back white as a sheet. Apparently, he got very close to a cage and one bounced off the bars roaring at him.
Last edited by jetdrvr : 4th October 2008 at 09:21.
Reason: add date
Flew a few time some "Weapon Guidance System" for "some guys" into some "very Oily country". Not too proud of it. The flights were officially done for a famous Big freight company. I initially tought it was just mail and computers. I resigned a few month later after discovering the dirty buisness..
I also had to do some schedule flights into Africa with our Medium size plane fully (to the top) loaded of 200 boxes containing 100 Day old Chikens each...at 3 USD per chiken. We had to be pretty carefull with the pressurisation: their tiny brain seems to be quite sensitive to abrupt changes of Pressure! (60,000 USD of noisy "pressure explosive"small stuff...better be smooth... ).
Serious money!
White man has no consideration for natives .. 
and some quite expensive damaged bag claims followed.
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