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.
Just wondering what the starngest thing you have ever had when handling cargo. Be it a coffin or gold or such. Do you get any extra money or do you just get sweet FA for it.
a clapped out old italian job mini to iceland, along with some snow ploughs and a pallet full of cadburys mini eggs. i like the sound of iceland. rgds all...ch
Here's something a little smaller than whales or cows.
I have heard that there's a daily shipment of live crickets out of Brisbane. Headed for zoos around the world as food for lizards, small monkeys etc. A friend of mine built the machine to package them, 30 to a container, with food for the flight.
I could tell you what the strangest cargo I ever carried was, but then I would have to shoot you. lets just say it involved flying under the cover of darkness, flanked by 2 nice shiny silver jets and we flew over a lot of sand.............
With no reference to MJ or VP8's comments on commercial staff :
Whilst stationed at Nairobi sales office, I sold, coordinated and accompanied a load of 3 x juvenile Rothschild Giraffe (was going to be 4, but 1 died of stress in the boma pre departure... )
Aircraft - L100/20 Eldoret, Kenya to unprpeared dirt strip in Uganda.
Great fun all round! Pretty hard to beat the experience as non-pilot!
The ad-hoc charter flight (widebody) from LUX to Mombasa, Kenya. Estimated payload was 50 000 kgs. At the time of loading it has turned to 50 (fifty) kilos (one small box). Nevertheless aircraft made a techstop at Cairo for refuelling as initially planned, becuase it was too late to change overflight/landing clearances through the Africa.
Had an AN124 take train carriages from MEL to somewhere in India a few times, plenty of "Mr. Stiffy's", boullion and some sort of scanner weighing 20t but we could only offload 18t!!! Just ask Ratty about that one!
11 elephants in a 747... offloaded with a large bucket in toe... furniture to baudolite for ex mr maputo kuwait airways spare engines baghdad to kuwait 1991 confiscated by saddam's men in GW1 artic foxes from oslo to harbin dolphins from mexico to lux in a dc8 the ship used in water world from france to hawaii -the film bombed and went way over budget(not suprised) alpacas peru to europe-spit included
the list goes on. still the strangest has to be a russian reg jet that showed up- loaded up a load of ericsson phones and filed outbound to ukfv (which is the ukraine fir) and left,about 20 minutes later another russian jet showed up legitimately for the phones and they had gone..
Ah yes, those yachts used in Waterworld, forgot about them. I loaded the things. November morning -15 degrees or something horrible like that. B744F maindeck completely full, 20T payload if I remember..
Did a generator to HKG, 40ft pallet gross weight 42000KG. Tie-down was fun .
strangest freight
, most desirable was an experimental Lamborgini Countach strapped to two AML pallet's with 'P' strops 
)
Giraffe
ok:
Just ask Ratty about that one!
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