hi.
saw a tank dissasembled -but being curious to what kind looked at manifest ,it was written down FARM MACHINERY.
one tough farmer eh.:ok:

Was in Alice Springs , Central Australia years ago and saw a battered Irish Dc8 or 707 which was loading camels bound for Saudi Arabia. Aparently the aussie models were pretty quick on the racetrack and were highly sought by the odd Oil Shiek or 3.

Private charter for one very Large and very expensive bangladeshy, curried tigerfish!

To be flown across the atlantic !

Plane was a bit wiffy on landing !

CEG-JER C550 four goldfish (one died)!

A camel spider from Masirah, Oman to Diego Garcia. I had no clue it was on board until the "funeral" in DGAR...it died enroute...

IE Class 201 built by GM in North America. Timescale for delivery and introduction was very tight. If they all came by sea, there would not have been time to train all the drivers and maintenance engineers in advance of scheduled introduction. Flying the first one over gave a couple of extra weeks for the training programme so that the rest could be used almost from the dockside.:ok:

154 live penguins and 3 live sharks. Cute little devils packed on ice.

Just landing on this post...Did somebody here spoke about General Electric Dash 9-44 CWs diesel locomotives (180 tons) that were ferried from GE factory (Ohio?) to Australia on board of an An 225 a few years ago?

Dom

Highly unlikely. There is just no reason or need for any Dash 9's to be airfreighted to Australia from the U.S. The charter cost over that distance would be astronomical.
They are West Australian Iron Ore loco's .. the Iron Ore Co's plan ahead, and any imported from the U.S. (new or used) are shipped by sea.
Can't even recall an AN225 ever landing at Perth .. however my memory has been faulty, once .. :)

Maybe this is one you're thinking of?? ..

http://www.historyofaircargo.com/i-T...ane-takes.html

Sending the Irish locomotive (which you linked to) by Antonov was all part of planning ahead. It allowed the maintenance teams to get up to speed on an example before the bulk of the delivery arrived by sea so they could be deployed immediately on arrival. All calculated out, it gave the best return on investment.

Thousands of cubic feet of stale air, how's that for strange? I kid you not, it happened 21st Sept TOM2017 Cardiff-Sanford. They offloaded every pax hold bag in favour of transporting a load of old manky stale Welsh air. Airlines eh, aren't they just fab!!

Human blood and spinal fluid for analysis from Bujumbura to Brussels

Cows..
 

120 Cows JNB - DUB On L-1011 PAX ( No Carco Door ):ugh:

Strange, lead lined, canisters into a grass strip in Holland, A BMW would turn up, swap the canisters over, then drive off.
I should imagine all was perfectly legal, but there always seemed to be a lack of paperwork.

Strange Freight To Remember
 

Strangest freight carried.....

A DC-10 load of silver bricks from Switzerland to Mambi India as an F/O for Gemini Air Cargo, and a 3/4 load of dead chickens delivered to Venezuella in a 727 while Captain for Capital Cargo. (No Ground A/C in Miami during a departure delay) Man were they ticked down there....

Back in the early 80's, transportating a load of Bahamian Defense Force soldier/drug types delivered to an out island at night in a DC-3, and consequently heard popping sounds in the plane's metal airframe after take-off. That was fun!

Jackie Onasis's race horse delivered to a tiny airport in Northwest France, with a taxiway too narrow for the DC-8, and a perfect single trench on both sides of the taxiway, from the outer main wheels, as we took out all their taxi lights.

Cheers!
Capt. Dave Bertrand (Ret.)

Myself;$16,000 USD worth of caviar for a well known singer/artist couple's breakfast in StBarths. 10kg box with its own handler!
My co-worker: 2 150lb endangered Turtles for a certain owner of a record company/airline/soft drink brand.
X

Apologoies for jumping, I am an ex freight forwarder, and could not resist the opportunity to post.
Back in the late 80's I worked for a forwarder at Gatwick who was tasked with the importation of a 28ft python constrictor for a tv ad. ( was the follow up to the real fires "the cat, the dog and the mouse" which someof you may remember.
Anyway, the said snake was packed in a crate with instructions to be loaded loose in the hold on arrival @ lgw due to the cold temperatues (jan in UK is never warm), these instructions were totally ignored, and the result being, that when said snake was delivered to cargo warehouse door, the vet who was looking after him looked at him and said snake was suffering from Hypothermia. We loaded crate into the back of a transit van, and headed for the nearest hotel, screeched up outside, and asked the hotel reception for a room with a hot bath for our dangerously cold snake! Anyway, all had a happy ending, advert was shown (just the once before it was banned, apparently a snake in the bath with a small child was deemed unsafe...)

A Gorilla to Jersey zoo

A Dog with a Wedding Dress on!!:D

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: