Explosive Chiken...
 

Flew a few time some "Weapon Guidance System" for "some guys" into some "very Oily country". Not too proud of it. The flights were officially done for a famous Big freight company. I initially tought it was just mail and computers. I resigned a few month later after discovering the dirty buisness..

I also had to do some schedule flights into Africa with our Medium size plane fully (to the top) loaded of 200 boxes containing 100 Day old Chikens each...at 3 USD per chiken. We had to be pretty carefull with the pressurisation: their tiny brain seems to be quite sensitive to abrupt changes of Pressure! (60,000 USD of noisy "pressure explosive"small stuff...better be smooth... :}).

That 'incident' wouldnt be commonly known as the Cold War, perhaps?:ok:

100 day old chickens ...
 

TRFN:

100 day old chicken - meaning Chicken ready to go ?? :} :} Did you wear gas masks, or had the windows open ???

Once I saw a shipment of 2 day old chick, and nobody wanted to enter the cargo plane after it landed - such a stink.

Apparently Chicken poo is highly corrosive ..

Hey EcureilX
 

Well, it was for sure not smelling rose, but still fine. Each box was packed of 100 "Day Old chicken"..(not "chikens of 100 days Old"!! hehe ) It was written on, even if I actually think they were a litle older than "one day", they already had nice yellow fethers..
Somehow as soon as we were at top of climb with a cabin altitude of 9,500 feet, they became totally silent...(but still stincky, for sure!)

TRF Nomad

12-ton block of marble (well strapped down!)

Was speaking to some of the lads here on the IL76 (to whom I am most grateful for the tour I got), and the stragest they had was a cargo of 300 Rwandan SLF. Seems they felt better about being 3 deep in the freight hold than 3 deep in the grave - cant say I blame them.

RIX

Salman Rushdie ..... whilst down the back was a group of 17 large Pakistani men :)

I had the "Olympic Flame" on board.
With special case authorization from the german CAA.

A cabin full of boxes of opium resin.










Oh, and a policeman!

Last year we have 3x 4 Tonne Rhinos :)

Air NZ Freigher ( Atlas B744F) Carried them from YMML, Melbourne Zoo - YBBN, They were trucked from Brisbane to Sunshine Coast ( Australia Zoo)

As for Day old Chicks, we handle them nearly nearly every second week in YBBN.
They come in from NZAA on NZ, tarmac transferred to PX for AYPY, on Pax aircraft, so down in the hauls.

24,000 lbs of golf balls on a Herc, flown to the Canadian high arctic to regain control of circulation in a gas drilling operation. The balls were pumped down the hole, then along came the next Herc with a load of peanut shells.....funny thing...it worked.

Approx 500lbs of cow dung from the outbound load of cattle.Was chewed out for not manifesting it inbound and not including on the wt.&bal!
A 450ib. horney gorilla
A noah's ark flt. to s. america with an handler who's last name was Hogfart.
Just a few.

47 tons of gold from Saudi to Switzerland.
Michael Jackson's stage gear including one large replica tank and a wardrobe sized container with a sticker on saying "Mikey's hair care".How big is a tub of hair gel ?
Disagreeable guys blindfolded and in orange jumpsuits.
1 ton of heoin.
Ostriches, an AN124 full of 'em from Afica to Belgium, not a sound from any of them the whole trip.

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.

unusual freight
 

200 porcelain toilets in a C130 RAF Masirah to RAF Salalah! 140T Turbine PLUS 45T of spares for a Hydro project in Phoenix, AZ from Linz, Austria in guess what? A clue ....... not the C130!!

We recieved a load for a MD-11 of steel bars about 4" in diameter and more than 20 ft long. The bars were stacked in sets of 6 and elevated with 2 or 3 stacks to fit male/female. It took us more than 12 hrs to get the load on.

After it was all locked down I thought of the possibility of these bars getting loose on landing and probably killing us all. The loadmaster agreed and demanded about a hundred more cargo straps to ind the load to the airframe and its self. It looked like a spider web when we were done.

After T/O I went back in the currier area and found the Loadmaster staring at the load through te net. The whole load settled and we spent the majority of the rest of the 7 1/2 hr flight from VCP to MIA tightening the load back down. It took the crew in Miami about 24 hrs to off load the aircraft. This was WOA, if you could fit it in we would fly it...

Our customer wanted to get their bang for their buck shipping pigs, picked up a load of pigs in a MD-11 stacked on top of eachother. The pigs generated soo much heat the aircraft could not overcome it and it was about 100f in the cockpit. Half the load died. That crew threw out everything including their luggage. I picked up the jet 3 legs later and still had to wash my clothes 3 times to get the stench off.

500 monkeys

Believe it or not
Bags full of cow's droppings

ClimbSequence
 

Can't help but calling B/S on that one.