400kg of dried fish wrapped in hessian with what appeared to be an equal quantity of flies (it had been piled at the side of the strip in the sun for four hours waiting for me) - it must be the most disgusting thing I have ever smelt, flew the whole 2 hour flight (and the empty return) with the windows open and the aircraft reeked for days afterwards.
Otherwise saline drips for a cholera epidemic supplied by the Indonesian government that were clearly marked as being 3 years past their sell by date, 45 gallon drums of diesel (not unusual until one splits in flight and you find two inches of diesel slopping around the rudder pedals), and ladders which are to long to fit in a 185 so you have one end sticking out of the front pax window and the other end out of the rear baggage door as if you had just picked them up from B & Q and are hoping the police won't spot you on the way home - the ladder made little difference to the aircrafts handling characteristics but when I repeated the experiment with rolled up sheets of corrugated aluminium roofing it flew like a pig!
Or as the aircraft was a kind of mini combi how about naked tribesmen covered in an inch of rancid pig fat to keep the cold out, or the guy with comound fractures of both thighs whose family simply bent his legs up as far as they could so there would be room for them to sit behind him on the flight to hospital.
Or the tribal passenger who decided he needed a dump in flight so he just let go in the back seat of a 185, with results that you can imagine. That last one actually happened to a colleague of mine and I p*ss myself laughing everytime I think of it (as I am doing now)!
Last edited by excrab; 9th Mar 2005 at 12:24.