126 horses, ANC-OKA with one pack inop. Main deck was WOX0F in horse sweat.

Horses were to be turned into dinner after the appropriate quarantine...

About 10 years ago we carried fish out of Africa, the thing was they were also loaded in the lower holds.
We got to Frankfurt and they unloaded the main deck and forward hold yet omitted the rear.
It was summer and very hot, the next day we came out to the aircraft and was met by the worst possible smell......... If only we had had a loadmaster

A classic charter load for good ol' TNT.
STN-LGG Empty Igloos
Full crew rest
LGG-STN Empty Igloos!!
Not even a documents pouch...

One charter request that used to crop up regularly when I was flying a desk a while back was day old chicks. Anyone carried these? I bet the micro feathers were a ba***rd....

Top Loadie,

Everybody keeps reminding me of my younger days!! We regularly took +/- 27 tons of day old chicks to Africa on the CL44. Couldn't hear the engines for the noise of the chicks & HOT!! Had to wear ear defenders to go back & make the coffee. Happy days!

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I'm not old, I was just born too early

Zimmer frames for HM Air Force from UK to Kenya!
Mainframe computers for Gaddafi Duck from Southend to Tripoli.
Moouse Heads from Stansted to Oslo,
but hey who cares it pays the mortgage and keeps the bank manager happy.

Back from the F1...good fun again. That AZ bird was an Atlas -400F in Alitalia paint scheme (N498MC).
We had 18500 liters of F1 fuel on board the 1st flight.

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rgds Rat

anyone flew the "special gargo" out in rwanda in mid-90's?

As groundhandler at MST, I have loaded horses onto B707's and DC-8's, squeezed computers into AN12's, stuffed millions and millions dollars worth of fags down IL76's and sent tons of meat to the Kingdom of Jordan. Unloading an AN124 stuffed up to the ceiling(cranerail) with Adidas sportsshoes was a particular long, hard and dangerous job!

But.....it was all fun!!!

2 AN124's, each with 120t of generators during the French floods.
Only when they got back to base did they realise that they still had the ignition keys for all the units in a brown evelope in the crew compartment!!

'special cargo' into Kigali in the mid 90's on the good old 707 :) :) :) :) :)

Dodge VIPER and a Masseratti LM2 from MIA to Medellin.(guess who was the owner??)

108 LLamas from La Paz(14000msl)to MIA, one born in flight.

Agricultor machinery from Baltimor to the jungle in Venezuela(no jepp App) out of an airforce base without paperwork. Come back emptly and change callsing in flight.

More agriculyor staff from MIA to ecuador during war with peru.

Rocket engines(full load) from LHR to FRA.

8 hours trip for one horse and return emptly.

God old 707

Cheese flavor...

And I remember the day a drum of that stuff was kicked open by a totally inadequate warehouse driver. They guy planted his forklift into the drum, and instead of allerting anyone he tried to cover up. Yeah, with that penetrating stink it was certainly not his best idea. The warehouse stank for another month. Yuck!

Oh, and there were these pallets knee high to AMD (Ahmadabad, India). With no MD highloader available and carefull preplanning we managed the DC10s trim pretty well. It seems to have been Silver.

And I remember the day we found an unsuspicious box leaking some strange liquid. The fire department came out and found it was some corrosive stuff. As it was undeclared the forwarder got shut down by the local authority where the flight came from and went out of business. Just did not want to pay these DGR extras...! The plane went into service on schedule...

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There's nothing like a three-holer...

My strangest would be the 2000 lbs of nuclear fuel rods from Spokane to South Carolina.The container weighed an additional 6000 pounds, then throw in 500 pounds for the DG paperwork and permits, and finally 600 pounds for the three armed couriers.I still don't use a night light.

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holdontsfmdirefs

15.000 lbs of high explosives, they parked us really far from the terminal after they finally relented to letting us land. US Gov shipment.

3 fifty gallons drums with paint into a Learjet 24, no forklift, loaded them of the back of a pickup truck. They kept making weird noises in flight due expansion.

A load a rear axles from somewhere south in the US to Dallas. Pretty ordinary, except the airport we loaded at had no ramp large enough for a DC-8, so we parked on the taxiway. Nor did they have an airstart, so we kept an engine running. That was all good, but we were met by a onearmed forklift driver and his kid, all the axles had to be placed on "cookies sheets", (greasy things!) and then loaded in the aircraft. That coupled with the fact it was hot as Hades, loud and with fumes coming from the running engine. This was not a great experience.

But I would not trade any of it.

Cr2 I flew the F1 cars to all the major gp's back in the 70's on cl44's we double stacked them on scffold framework I guess I could claim some sort of record for the highest scaffolding erected.

I remember, in the mid 70s, flying 3 large crates each of which contained a bustard- a 'large tall ostrich-like swift running bird of the family Otididae'. Some organization was trying to restock Salisbury Plain with these things which had died out there many years before. We picked them up in Lisbon and fed them hard boiled eggs on the way which they seemed to like. The loadie did, however, receive lacerations to his fingers while feeding these large creatures!! I don't think it worked!!
mcdhu

Flew nuclear stuff to India some years ago.
We loaded it all the way aft to minimize exposure to radiation.

Also a DC-8 load of paper money:
2 Billion riyals from Jeddah to Riyad.
Included was 3 cans of holy water to to bless the safe arrival of the dough and armed guards to keep the crew honest.

Hauled the race cars and the chickens, the flowers and the big animals etc.
Miss flying freight. If my present employer had freighters, I would bid 'em in a heart beat.

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Men, this is no drill...

Arrived at an offshore platform in Nigeria once to find a passenger accompanied by the frozen 190-pound grouper he'd caught the day before. The baggage bay in the Bell-212 isn't that big so it had to be strapped in to the seat beside him.

To my great disappointment he didn't put his arm round it.

Just got back now from Zaire, we took several crates of cash down to the government.

All that nice new money mmmmmmmmm

I am off now to go and buy a Ferrari F1

Off course I am honest!;-)

Just got back from MUC with the return F1 ex YMX. 5Y N409MC were also there on the same run (AZ flt nbr). Got home almost an hour ahead of schedule - good handling at all stations.

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rgds Rat