Ouzo anyone ??
In a previous life flying food aid in Africa we had a particular hole of a destination that was always hot with a really short 'runway' and when it rained turned to a quicksand type of mud that would ground the aircraft for about 3 days. This hell hole always produced a late item or two of cargo in hessian sacks (unmanifested of course) when we wanted to take off and the thunderstorms were almost upon us. They clinked a lot and when I asked what was in there after take off (this being my first trip to paradise of course) I was informed it was Ouzo, lots of it.
I thought about this on the 2 1/2 hour leg home and bailed the captain up about it later in the evening. I did not mind carrying the cargo at all, Ouzo was the only drink you could get in this part of the world if you were lucky but I did think it posed a hell of a fire risk in the cabin even though we were a freighter operation.
Eventually since we could not really say no to the carriage of the stuff we threatened to offload it all each and every time unless the crew were given two bottles every time a run was made.
The ouzo had the last laugh though, the very next time we carried the stuff we almost got done by a rather large electrical storm and required the entire 2 bottles over the following two nights to calm the nerves and get us back into a flying state whilst the engineers checked the aircraft thoroughly for damage from the awful flight...
RPP