Air Atlanta 747's
I have a story about the 1st Air Atlanta 747-200 to visit LTN, which did a mini-series of flights to Iceland May-July 2001 taking people on whale-watching trips. I had the privilege (?) of despatching the 1st one on 5th May. When the flight crew arrived they asked for 80,000kgs of fuel, with a trip fuel of around 34000kgs (i.e. round trip fuel). Apart from sounding seriously excessive (I thought at first - being American pilots - they must have meant LBS not KGS), Shell were not equipped to deal with such a quantity. In spite of having a fuel truck plugged in both sides, both trucks got emptied and had to go back to refill, which delayed the flight about an hour if I remember correctly.
The aircraft was in an all economy layout with 499 seats, nearly all of which were taken. There was a bit of baggage as some passengers were staying overnight (the rest were on a day trip). I don't recall the exact figures but the take-off weight must have approaching 300,000kgs (max TOW - off a proper runway - I think was 356,000kgs). The weather was warm, sunny and with no wind. Runway in use 08. There was a handful of airport workers gathered on the east apron to watch the take off, many standing on top of various sets of steps. The take off run was, unsurprisingly, pretty laborious. Looking towards the east end of the runway, a clump of trees used to block the view quite close to the runway end. The aircraft disappeared behind said trees with its nose still firmly on the ground. When it reappeared the other side of the trees its nose was, well, just about off the ground with the rest of the aircraft following. I don't think the airport ops guy I spoke to afterwards was exaggerating when he said rotation was in the turning circle.
The next day, the aircraft did the same trip, took 68000kgs of fuel, had 10kts of wind down the runway and soared into the sky with around 1000ft of runway to spare, much to the disappointment of the (several hundred) airport staff who had gathered to watch it, having heard about the previous days take-off being "interesting".