PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - strangest freight
View Single Post
Old 12th Mar 2009, 14:26
  #294 (permalink)  
Four Wings
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: England
Posts: 76
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
I'm just SLF, but I remember flying on a Comet to S'pore in 1953 there were several trays of day-old chicks in the galley (the hold not being pressurised or heated), and the older, skirted chicks told me that they regularly carried radioactive isotopes (for medical equipment) in special containers in the wing tips.
And when I had a car accident in Sierra Leone in 1963 a friend brought a complete front wing for my Ford Taunus from Monrovia, Liberia as carry-on baggage on a Viscount.

Then of course there was good old Aden Airways with mixed configuration 'DC3s' actually ex C47s (with original cargo doors) where you might be sitting next to a box of 0.303 ammunition or a spare bulldozer blade. My girl friend (great at chatting up the Agent) once got two Brit Govt passengers turned off, with their seats, to make room for the Arab chest she had just bought.

The saddest story was of the Cathay Pacific DC4 (their only 4 engine aircraft at the time) shot down by the Communist Chinese in 1953 because it was carrying French Government gold to the French Colonial govt in Saigon (to pay for the war) on their regular weekly service, just before Dien Bien Phu.

And of course there is the whole story of the huge airlift into Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War 1968-70. Everything imaginable was carried in, but only at night. We shipped in drums of bitumen for the runway at Uli-Ihiala, but I watched case after case of Heinekens being loaded alongside the CSM.

The only time i've seen an Aeroflot stewardess in tears was when their brand new Il18s were loaded with a cwt sack of flour on each seat in the Congo airlift Accra-Leopoldville (aka Kinshasa) in 1960.
Four Wings is offline