A Party of 'Bees' going on 'Honeymoon'!!:D

Strangest Freight
 

Hi Folks, As I am new to the Forum, Hi My fellow Loady's.
Biggest / Heaviest I ever had to deal with B747-200F FRA-ORD
1 x Pump for the Canadien Gas Line 52,000 kg. That was fun :ugh: ,
We needed 2 Loaders, Cranes and losts of smoke and mirrors.
The straping alone made it look like a cocoon.

28000kg of gold bullion.

10 baby elephants and 10 Aldabra tortoises

1 - Large aircraft

1 - 20 Litre bucket

75 - day old turtles destined for a sanctury


One of the best things I have done in my flying career.

Big banana split
 

Thumrait to Abu Dhabi by C130, was 4 x 1000 lb bombs and a pallet of bananas.

I said to the skipper, 'if this lot goes up, we'll be the biggest banana split ever'.

Needless to say it didn't.

Odd mixture, but we were 'ad hocing' anyway.

A dolphin, a Maibach (The only thing on the 747), carpet, and of course for Valentine's day 220,000 lbs of roses!

5 hunting JP233 airfield denial weapons (bombs) from EMA to RAF Wildenrath in a Merchantman (Vickers Vanguard) subsequently used in Gulf War One resulting in several Tornadoes down.

2 adult White Rhinos, UK-JNB.
1 4ft inflatable dingy (deflated) with oars, CGN-HKG (only freight on board)
98 Tons of Tic-Tacs, SNN-EWR
1 6ft roll of carpet on pax 727, ATH-CMN
118 Tons Generators, MRS-CMB. 2 days later, CMB-CDG-CMB as pax on Air France to recover ignition keys for 118 Tons of generators.

Here's a tip pg
 

How about the CAA loading inspector. Managed to get rid of him before departure though - due to weight & balance problems!!:p

123 lbs of crystal methamphetamine in a big cardboard box, a 70's era VW microbus with a false floor used to conceal said drugs, the driver of the van, two DEA agents and the Kansas State Trooper who made the bust. All this in the back of a C-141B from McConnell AFB to ORD.
Sheesh, wonder what a rapid decompression would do to the contents of that box...?:ooh:

Chicken Runs
 

My intro to night cargo was flying a Beech 18 with around 10,000 passengers from Ankeny Iowa to Opalocka (recently hatched baby chicks for export to Columbia).

They didn't smell yet (they were to young to even sh#t yet) but at the end of the flight your throat would be sore and dry and everything in the airplane was coated in yellow dust (from calcium that coats their feathers as they grow). We also flew altitudes based on temperature instead of winds to keep them happy. Try explaining that to ATC. It was a little different.

You don't hear much of their complaints once you crank up those two P&Ws but an old hand told me that "They peep when they're hungry. They peep when they're too hot. They peep when they're too cold. If they're quiet, it means they're either happy or dead."

Bottle Nosed Dolphins
 

Two bottle-nosed dolphins in seperate holding tanks. The flt was a 4 hour jaunt in a Hercules L382g from Walvis Bay to Durban.
The 2 dolphins were for the dolphin marina.

Sentani-Wamena kerosene cargo flights.
 

How about transporting dozens of drums filled with DPK ( dual purpose kerosene, good for avtur as well as cooking stove fuel for natives of Wamena high plateau ) from Sentani Airport ( Jayapura, Papua ) to Wamena airstrip onboard 27 yrs old Transall C-160 (A-MBB's "twin Hercules"). A complicated tying down job for those battered drums, really. You guys may ask why not using collapsible tank or....flying tanker instead. Well, we used to fly them in HS 748 and then An-12 too recently.

cargo
 

... the most extrange, among many CAOs ... 320 poisonous snakes, from Brazil to the US for laboratory works.
Ahh ... no extra money, but really not big deal ... safe boxes and kept the door of our B763F closed all time ;-)
alb.///

2 noisy pigs from the heartland of borneo. 4 passengers onboard. DH6 Twin Otter

I have read this forum a many times, but only registered today......not all of it so bear with me if I duplicate or post a 'strangest freight' mine may not be so strange........

Approx 12 tonnes of US embassy material headng for Russia (cross load from a 747F to DC-8F).....not so strange but had a US guard.....due to 'allegedly' an incident that happens many years ago between Russia and the US.

A rabid dogs head for research.....rather the resarechers than me to be honest (oh and we lost it for 2 days.....that was interesing).

Is there a scariest freight thread?.....23 ton download on a Commander 30 with no crane.....that was a buttock clincher.

Other 'stuff' will pop in my mind as time goes by no doubt

Love the Freight Dog thread by the way.....shame it doesnt get more interest.

Strange Stuff
 

6500 lbs of IRS, checks SLC to DFW

Japanese sushi from Denver to Durango, CO in a Navajo. It was a daily shipment, came across the Pacific on NCA, not sure who brought it to Denver but by the time it got on my plane it was already smelling bad, in spite of being packed in ice and styrofoam.

Also took assorted mice, birds, etc to the pet store in Durango on the same plane. Unpressurized, no heat in the cargo compartment, minimum 16,500 feet over the Rockies. The critters were always scratching and chirping in Denver, always real quiet by the time we got to Durango. The customer never complained.

I also frequently haul Millstone coffee from Denver to Cody, WY for Walmart. Why Walmart has to pay UPS' overnight airfreight for coffee is beyond me.

My strangest freight was a couple of baby giraff from Miami to Buenos Aires.
Other strange flight was from Buenos Aires to Brunei with 67 horses.
We had fuel stops in Maputo (Mozambique) and Kuala Lumpur. After Brunei, we flew to Macau for electronics cargo and then to Anchorage-Los Angeles-Miami.
All this flight with only one crew, one week adventure.
It was a flight around the world.:ok::ok::ok: